Linux Commands: Create a Bootable USB Flash Drive with the dd command

If you find yourself in this position of wanting to create a bootable flash drive on Linux, but your distribution doesn’t have an application installed, there is a command line tool for that called dd.

You need to download an iso file from the distributions website. I’m using Pop!_OS in this example.

The first step is to find the name of the flash drive plugged into your computer – here I am using fdisk to list all drives. My USB is named /dev/sda. Please check carefully for the USB drive name.

sudo fdisk -l

The second step is to run dd command giving input (if) and output (of).
Input (iso filename): pop-os_22.04_amd64_nvidia_1.iso
Output (USB name): /dev/sda

Run the command with root privileges…

sudo dd if=pop-os_22.04_amd64_nvidia_1.iso of=/dev/sda

The dd command takes some time to run – 464s (7.7 minutes) for this example.