Creating a Bootable Ubuntu UEFI USB Drive
Creating a boot USB for UEFI is super easy. Follow this step by step guide to create your own.
Table of Contents
Before you begin there are a few things you’re going to need:
- USB drive you don’t mind erasing (>8GB in size)
- ISO file for the OS you want to make bootable
- We’re going to use Ubuntu 18.04.1 for this example from Ubuntu.com,
but the exact same method can be used for a Windows 7+ ISO, you just need the ISO file so you can extract the contents
to your USB drive
- Updated February 24, 2019: Creating a bootable USB for the October 2018 update for Windows 10 can no longer be accomplished using the below instructions. Please see the tutorial Creating a Bootable Windows 10 UEFI USB Drive Using Linux for updated information.
- We’re going to use Ubuntu 18.04.1 for this example from Ubuntu.com,
but the exact same method can be used for a Windows 7+ ISO, you just need the ISO file so you can extract the contents
to your USB drive
- 7-zip installed
Formatting the USB Drive
Insert your USB drive, then open the “Disks” utility
Choose your USB drive from the available drives on the left then click the stop button to unmount the drive
Click the “gear” icon and then click Format Partition
Give the volume a name. Spaces are allowed but sticking with underscores (_) and hyphens (-) will make things easier to reference from the command line. Let’s give it the name of “Ubuntu_UEFI”. Make sure the “FAT” option is chosen, then click Next
WARNING
Clicking “Apply” on the following screen WILL delete ALL data on the selected partition. Ensure the correct drive/partition is chosen as choosing the wrong drive WILL DELETE ALL DATA on that drive. You have been warned.
A summary warning screen will appear asking you to confirm the details. When you are ready click “Format”
When the format is complete you can click the “Play” button to mount the drive
Creating the UEFI Bootable USB
Now that we have a freshly formatted FAT USB drive, we can proceed to creating the UEFI bootable USB
Open a terminal window
Before we copy the files to our USB stick using 7-zip (‘7z x’ command), let’s display our USB drive info and Downloads folder listing so we have an easy reference
$ df -h | grep -i media $ ls ~/Downloads $ 7z x ~/Downloads/ubuntu-18.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso -o/media/blah/Ubuntu_UEFI/
Looks like 7-zip is not installed on this system. That’s ok, let’s go ahead and install it now with the following commmand:
$ sudo apt install p7zip-full
Now let’s run our extract command again and we should receive a status screen from 7-zip for the extracting files
$ 7z x ~/Downloads/ubuntu-18.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso -o/media/blah/Ubuntu_UEFI/
After the extraction is finished you should see the message “Everything is OK”
Check to see if the USB drive now contains files with the ‘ls’ command
$ ls -la /media/blah/Ubuntu_UEFI/
Congratulations, you should now have a UEFI bootable USB Drive built of a Ubuntu 18.04.1 OS : )
Until Later ^‿^
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