Use a USB 3.0 Drive, If You Can For only $15, it’s a great upgrade USB 2.0 has been around forever, and everything supports it, but it’s notoriously slow. You’ll be much better off since the prices have dropped dramatically, and the speed increases are enormous you can get 10x the speed. And speed really matters when you’re making a boot drive.

The Live USB will be wiped at each boot, so you can’t save files, but you can try out the OS. If you are using a Mac, you can easily create a Linux Live USB in macOS by following the instructions below. Make bootable USB with unetbootin ubuntu. UNetbootin is a free program for both Windows, Linux and MacOS X that allows the user to create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions instead of burning a CD. It runs on both Windows and Linux.

Editor’s Note: We use here at How-To Geek, and at $15 for a 32 GB version, it’s well worth the upgrade. You can even get it in sizes up to 128 GB if you want. Don’t worry about compatibility, these faster drives are fully compatible with an old USB 2.0 system, you just won’t get the speed boosts.

And if your desktop computer doesn’t support USB 3.0. For Windows 7, 8, or 10 RELATED: Use Microsoft’s own to create a bootable drive you can install Windows from. You’ll need a Windows installer ISO file to run this tool.

If you don’t have one, you can — you’ll need a legitimate product key to use them, though. Provide the ISO file and a USB flash drive and the tool will create a bootable drive. RELATED: Alternatively, if you’re installing Windows 10, you can download an ISO or burn Windows 10 installation media directly using. From a Linux ISO RELATED: There are many tools that can do this job for you, but we recommend a free program called —it’s faster and more reliable than many of the other tools you’ll see recommended, including UNetbootin. Download the Linux distribution you want to use in.ISO form. Run the tool, select your desired distribution, browse to your downloaded ISO file, and choose the USB drive you want to use. The tool will do the rest.

You can use similar tools on Linux. Outlook for mac update series updates all occurrences. For example, Ubuntu includes a Startup Disk Creator tool for creating bootable Ubuntu USB drives.

From an IMG File Some operating system projects provide an IMG file instead of an ISO file. An IMG file is a raw disk image that needs to be written directly to a USB drive. Use to write an IMG file to a USB drive or SD card. Provide a downloaded IMG file and the tool will write it directly to your drive, erasing its current contents. You can also use this tool to create IMG files from USB drives and SD cards.

Linux users can use the dd command to directly write an IMG file’s contents to a removable media device. Insert the removable media and run the following command on Ubuntu: sudo dd if=/home/user/file.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M Replace /home/user/file.img with the path to the IMG file on your file system and /dev/sdX with the path to your USB or SD card device. Be very careful to specify the correct disk path here — if you specify the path to your system drive instead, you’ll write the contents of the image to your operating system drive and corrupt it For DOS RELATED: If you need to boot into DOS to use a low-level firmware upgrade, BIOS update, or system tool that still requires DOS for some reason, you can use the tool to. Rufus uses FreeDOS, an open-source implementation of DOS that should run whatever DOS program you need to use. From Mac OS X Installation Files RELATED: You can by downloading the latest version of OS X from the Mac App Store.