Unleashing the Power of ‘dd’: Creating Bootable USB Drives

Introduction

The dd command, is a powerful and versatile tool available on Unix-like operating systems. One of its most compelling use cases is creating bootable USB drives. In this blog post, we’ll explore how dd can be harnessed to copy files to a USB drive and make it bootable, opening up a world of possibilities for system administrators, developers, and anyone looking to install or recover operating systems.

Understanding ‘dd’

The dd command is a simple yet potent tool for copying and converting data. Its syntax is as follows

dd if=input_file of=output_file bs=block_size

• if : Input file (source).
• of : Output file (destination).
• bs : Block size, determining the amount of data copied at once.

Making a USB Drive Bootable

Step 1: Identify the USB Drive

Before proceeding, identify the path to your USB drive. You can use the following command to list all connected drives:

$ lsblk

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 238.5G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2   8:2    0    20G  0 part /
└─sda3   8:3    0 218.9G  0 part /home
sdb      8:16   0   1.8T  0 disk 
└─sdb1   8:17   0   1.8T  0 part /mnt/data