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Bootable USB Flash Drive Creation

In order to put a KaOS ISO image onto an USB flash drive, you will need a drive capable of storing 8 Gb, a system with USB ports and some specialized software.

Make sure the system where you will boot the USB flash drive from, has functional USB ports and can boot USB flash drives. Before following any steps, make sure the device is plugged in but not mounted.

Some UEFI implementations struggle with USB3/USB2 compatibility mode. It’s best to use USB 2 sticks on USB 2 ports, and vice versa.

Windows

Universal USB Installer (correct EFI installation for modern hardware)

Option for Windows is Universal USB Installer. Open the Universal USB Installer executable.

  1. Select your USB disk.

  2. Select the Reinstall or Update? tick box, this will initialize the disk.

  3. Select the option that states Select a Distribution to put on... from here select Try and unlisted ISO...

  4. Click on the Browse button, select your downloaded KaOS ISO file, then click the Create button.

You can now boot into this USB via the EFI options in your BIOS.

From Windows command line

Once installed, open the command prompt and type (substitute the correct path):

Terminal window
dd.exe if=/path/to/the/downloaded/iso of=/path/to/the/USB/device

Linux Distributions

ISO ImageWriter

  1. Click the folder icon and browse to the directory containing the ISO

  2. Select the USB Drive to use and click Create

Using the command line

In order to create a bootable USB flash drive, you will need coreutils (which provides dd). Most GNU distributions have coreutils already installed.

To use dd, open a terminal and write (substitute the correct path):

Terminal window
sudo dd if=/path/to/the/downloaded/iso of=/path/to/the/USB/device

To check if the creation of the bootable USB stick was successful, use fdisk as root to check it. You should see an asterisk (*) like this in your USB line:

Terminal window
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 697 713728 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS