ISO images are typically used to distribute operating system installers. These images will then need to be burned into an external drive such as a USB stick or portable hard drive to be booted from when installing the operating system..
Many Linux tools can be used to create a bootable USB drive from ISO image, and dd is probably the most universally available for. dd is a command-line tool and is installed by default in most Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, or SUSE.
Steps to burn ISO file to USB stick in Linux:
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Launch a terminal application.
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Check if your image is in the correct iso9660 format and is bootable.
$ file Downloads/ubuntu-21.04-desktop-amd64.iso Downloads/ubuntu-21.04-desktop-amd64.iso: ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data (DOS/MBR boot sector) 'Ubuntu 21.04 amd64' (bootable)
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Check for currently available block devices.
$ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT loop0 7:0 0 55.4M 1 loop /snap/core18/1997 loop1 7:1 0 219M 1 loop /snap/gnome-3-34-1804/66 loop2 7:2 0 64.8M 1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1514 loop3 7:3 0 32.3M 1 loop /snap/snapd/11588 loop4 7:4 0 51M 1 loop /snap/snap-store/518 loop5 7:5 0 65.1M 1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1515 sda 8:0 0 20G 0 disk sdb 8:16 0 20G 0 disk ├─sdb1 8:17 0 1M 0 part ├─sdb2 8:18 0 513M 0 part /boot/efi └─sdb3 8:19 0 19.5G 0 part / sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
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Insert your USB drive or stick and wait for a few seconds for it to be detected by the system.
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Check for the device name of your newly inserted usb drive.
$ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT loop0 7:0 0 55.4M 1 loop /snap/core18/1997 loop1 7:1 0 219M 1 loop /snap/gnome-3-34-1804/66 loop2 7:2 0 64.8M 1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1514 loop3 7:3 0 32.3M 1 loop /snap/snapd/11588 loop4 7:4 0 51M 1 loop /snap/snap-store/518 loop5 7:5 0 65.1M 1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1515 sda 8:0 0 20G 0 disk sdb 8:16 0 20G 0 disk ├─sdb1 8:17 0 1M 0 part ├─sdb2 8:18 0 513M 0 part /boot/efi └─sdb3 8:19 0 19.5G 0 part / sdc 8:32 1 58.6G 0 disk ├─sdc1 8:33 1 2.5G 0 part /media/user/Ubuntu 20.04 LTS amd64 └─sdc2 8:34 1 3.9M 0 part /media/user/1079-24A3 sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
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Make sure all the partitions of your USB drive is not mounted.
$ sudo umount /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdc2 [sudo] password for user:
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Copy the ISO image to your thumb drive using dd.
$ sudo dd if=Downloads/ubuntu-21.04-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdc conv=fdatasync 5505348+0 records in 5505348+0 records out 2818738176 bytes (2.8 GB, 2.6 GiB) copied, 628.961 s, 4.5 MB/s
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Check if ISO image successfully copied to your USB drive.
$ sudo blkid /dev/sdc /dev/sdc: BLOCK_SIZE="2048" UUID="2021-04-20-11-16-16-00" LABEL="Ubuntu 21.04 amd64" TYPE="iso9660" PTUUID="af8737a9-1e23-4373-b87a-c8b16199d461" PTTYPE="gpt"
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Disconnect your USB drive from your machine.