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Flashing an OS Image on Linux

  1. Download the ISO or IMG you want. You can wget from somewhere, use your own, whatever.

  2. 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 enter w to write and leave the utility.

  3. 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
    
  4. 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