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
  • 7-zip installed

Formatting the USB Drive

  1. Insert your USB drive, then open the “Disks” utility alt text

  2. Choose your USB drive from the available drives on the left then click the stop button to unmount the drive alt text

  3. Click the “gear” icon and then click Format Partition alt text

  4. 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 alt text

    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.

  5. A summary warning screen will appear asking you to confirm the details. When you are ready click “Format” alt text

  6. When the format is complete you can click the “Play” button to mount the drive alt text

Creating the UEFI Bootable USB

Now that we have a freshly formatted FAT USB drive, we can proceed to creating the UEFI bootable USB

  1. Open a terminal window alt text

  2. 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/
    alt text

  3. 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
    alt text

  4. 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/
    alt text

  5. After the extraction is finished you should see the message “Everything is OK” alt text

  6. Check to see if the USB drive now contains files with the ‘ls’ command

    $ ls -la /media/blah/Ubuntu_UEFI/
    alt text

Congratulations, you should now have a UEFI bootable USB Drive built of a Ubuntu 18.04.1 OS : )

If you have any questions/comments please leave them below.

Thanks so much for reading ^‿^

Claire

If this tutorial helped you out please consider buying me a pizza slice!