../ (back)
Flashing an OS Image on Linux
-
Download the ISO or IMG you want. You can
wget
from somewhere, use your own, whatever. -
Format the target drive. We will use the linux tool fdisk for most of this.
$ fdisk /dev/sdx
This will start the format disk utility. You can see the availible commands by entering
m
, but here are the highlights:m – print help p – print the partition table n – create a new partition d – delete a partition q – quit without saving changes w – write the new partition table and exit
We are just deleting any existing partitions from this drive. Enter
d
and select the partitions to delete, and enterw
to write and leave the utility. -
If you are flashing to a hard disk, we have to make a hybrid iso.
We will use the program isohybrid, from syslinux-utils.
$ cp orig_image.iso hybrid.iso $ isohybrid hybrid.iso
-
Now to flash the disk. We will use the built-in utility
dd
.dd if=[source file] of=[destination disk] bs=8M
for example:
dd if=hybrid.iso of=/dev/sdd bs=8M
Thats it!
Future note, you can also format the disk for filesystem use
$ mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdbX