What are Reddit's favorite Bootable USB Creator Apps?

This bad motherfucker contains 8 Distros, Win 7, 8.1, 10 (Creators and Fall Creators), Win10PE, Memtest86, Acronis True Image, Freenas, a ful standard disk image for our PCs, and a few other tools. ALL bootable.

Heres how you can be a bad motherfucker like me for free

Yes, it's Ubuntu. You can try it on a memory stick without replacing your OS if you want to try it

edit: for everyone asking, download the iso from the Ubuntu website, and use this to put it on a bootable memory stick. You then just reboot and run from the memory stick, click try, and bam you're in Ubuntu. If you feel like you want to install or dual-boot, you can do that whilst running it off the memory stick. There will be an icon on the desktop to do it.

I have a USB v3 64gb stick with VenToy on it with MX, Mint, CentOS, Kali, and Clonezilla.

You put VenToy on like a live disk and it creates a directory, put your ISOs there with a common copy paste from your OS.

https://www.ventoy.net

If you want more on this, see here.

But really, were it not for Microsoft abusing their power and arbitrarily refusing to sign anything that's licensed under GPLv3, it would have been signed years ago...

Also, the official page is https://rufus.ie.

Sure thing, it happens. Just a warning, Windows will tell you that you need a setup key which costs about $100. You don't actually NEED it. You can just hit "Not now" or whatever when it asks for a key. After a little while you will see a "ACTIVATE WINDOWS" water mark and certain non essential settings (like desktop color theming and backgrounds) will be blocked behind the Windows activation. There's plenty of ways to pirate Windows license keys if you check around but I've personally never bothered.

If you want a fully free operating system, you can check out the world of Linux. Ubuntu is very simple to start with and has a nice interface. It also is based off the same distro that Valve is using for SteamOS so it's very friendly with games.

https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

And if you need a tool for burning these OS's to your flash drive, Balena Etcher is great and incredibly simple to use.

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Hey.

pssst.

PSSSST.

Ich hab gehört du hast Ärger mit deinem Betriebssystem?

Ich hab da was.

Probiers doch einfach mal aus.

Geht auch ganz schnell. Halbe Stunde oder so. Brauchst nichts installieren, kannst es einfach nur mal ausprobieren. Schadet doch nicht.

Meine persönliche Empfehlung dazu...

To avoid corrupt OS, create a usb bootable windows installation and use that OS for memory testing. I recommend https://rufus.ie/ for creating a usb boot device.

Also, some boards allow you to set your reset button to safe boot, it saves a lot of time when trying to train your memory and figuring out timings.

Check out Easy2Boot. Once set up, you can start up a completely regular ISO straight from the filesystem. I'm in the process of redoing my work flash drives, but so far I've got:

• Linux Mint starting into a persistent environment (32 and 64 bit, it chooses depending on the computer)
• Clonezilla Live, which will immediately begin cloning a computer with a predetermined image at boot (once again, 32/64 bit aware)
• Start straight into Windows 7 or 8 install ISOs with several preset options (32/64 aware)
• Several utility ISOs like memtesting and password reset ISOs

All of this is from one drive. While its UI and documentation is horrendously organized, the documentation is all there, and it's quite comprehensive at that. Pretty impressive.

Seconded. Works great.

Install ISO to USB and just put it on a flash drive. Your good ol' onion stick.

EDIT: Pendrivelinux Might work better for this application. Not sure which one I used. If ISO>USB doesn't work, then try Pendrivelinux.

Rufus developer here.

If you are interested, you can find a .appx (Windows Store) package for Rufus 3.0 in our (not so public) <code>testing/</code> directory. We also have ARM and ARM64 versions there.

That'll provide you with some form of installer.

However, because Rufus must run elevated, you will need to right click on the app, and then select run as an admin every time you launch it.

For the record, this is also the reason why we can't submit Rufus to the official Windows Store, because Microsoft does not allow submission for anything that requires admin access to a computer (which Rufus requires to be able to partition and format a drive).

Hooray i found out how to properly make a BOKEH DOF effect in Vegas. no more Gaussian blur!

I strongly advise against viewing this on consoles as it may cause damage because BOKEH is too advanced.

Also quick question, shall i make the new "why it matters" today or wait for tomorrow as to not be "spammy"?

this is what i used to make the bootable USB for anybody wondering

Seems like a known issue https://github.com/pop-os/iso/issues/224 there are some work arounds in that post.

Edit: are you using Yumi boot to create your bootable USB drive? In that case, use something else. Someone suggested Etcher and I agree https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Portable versions of Wireshark, Zenmap, iperf, putty, and angry ip scanner are my base tools along with installers for solarwinds free tftp server, VirtualBox, and my common ios files. Then usually a copy of my base config, VPN software, and some notes. If you are linux savvy I'm a big fan of a security distro like one of these. Best solution I've found is to use Linux Live to make a thumb drive with your preferred distro, Let it hide the files, and then put your windows tools on top.

As a college student, I keep a USB with Ubuntu on it (try Lili or Wubi). Whenever someone's laptop refuses to boot up, I can usually boot off of the usb. I can't fix their computers, but I can recover their files at least before they send it in to the pros.

This is just a video of clicking next, next, next, next, finish with YUMI – Multiboot USB Creator which creates a USB with a bunch of Live ISOs.

That's cool, but that's not the same as installing to a USB Flash Drive. I have Ubuntu installed to a high perf. USB 3.0 flash drive, just like you would installing to an external HDD. It boots up instantly and runs like an SSD. It works just like an internal HDD install. Everything updates normally and not casper FS limitions or performance issues. Ext4 is also fairly gentle to your flash in terms of write wear.

For an IT bag of tricks, the multi-boot is probably more useful. But for carrying your OS/data in your pocket, installing to the USB drive is the way to go.

Format a thumb drive as an easy2boot system.

Download the lastest Tails OS iso.

Drop the ISO file in _ISO/LINUX

Boot your computer from the thumb drive.

Have fun, everything will work out of the box. When you browse you will browse from different IP adresses and you can click on .onion links. And while doing all of this you will know you are pissing of the NSA.

It's also nice to get some experience with being on a secure system that is semi anonymous and browsing a network that can't be censored or shut down. Hey you might need it one day. For any journalist that is doing anything that goes against the interests of a modern nation state this is now a must.

https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

Every ISO is a selectable option on the boot menu of the USB drive.

You boot from the USB drive and then the multiloader lets you select what you want to do

So you want to become a script kiddy and try and hack with backtrack 5 eh. That's not really the way to learn, you want to read read and read security books. ( http://www.amazon.com/Certified-Ethical-Hacker-Exam-Prep/dp/0789735318 )

To install a OS to a USB use this program, ( http://www.linuxliveusb.com/ ) it will download it, format the drive, and install it to USB for you.

If you are truly interested in learning a different OS, I suggest Linuxmint, Ubuntu or Fedora. Once you get your feet wet with those, try a Gentoo box.

I use easy2boot and it works wonders for me. Nice menu system and easy to setup, just drop ISOs inside folders which create the menu system. I found a link to it either on this sub or on the /r/sysadmin sub from someone who uses it for imaging systems.

Grab unetbootin , a copy of the latest clonezilla build (iso) , use unetbootin to install clonezilla to a usb drive, then boot to your usb, follow the prompts to do a disk-to-disk copy.

Edit: clarification

You can use Rufus to build a bootable USB with the Windows build of your choice, all the way back to 1507 IIRC. If you don't have an ISO/disk for the version you want, Rufus will download it and build it for you.

https://rufus.ie/

1. Create a recovery USB using Rufus
2. Cold shutdown by holding power button
3. Boot from the USB by getting advanced boot options (usually by spamming the F keys and Del)
4. Reset the PC or worst case fresh install

Yumi can create issues if you also have windows ISO there. I have switched over to Easy2Boot since over a year. It's a lovely little program. You need to run it only once on the USB and later on you can just go on copying the iso's to it. The menu is automatically created at boot time.

EDIT: Forgot your side question. Here's the iso's that I have

• Acronis True Image

• Easeus Data Recovery

• Hiren's Boot CD

• Minitools partition wizard

• NT Password Recovery

• Sea Tools for DOS

• Various AV Rescue Disks - AVG, Avira, Bit Defender, Comodo, Kaspersky

The linux GUI needs to be run as root and exposes an open network port. It's bad practice. Don't do this unless you understand the DK effect and really know what you're doing.

From https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_linux_webui.html

> 1. run sudo sh VentoyWeb.sh in the terminal
> 2. open browser and visit http://127.0.0.1:24680

> (...)
> You can also specify the IP and port like this sudo sh VentoyWeb.sh -H 192.168.0.100 -P 8080

Try this - macOS Recovery over the Internet, hold down Option-Command-R or Shift-Option-Command-R at startup.

Failing this you will need to create a boot usb drive. An easy tool is - http://diskmakerx.com/ however you need access to another mac to do this.

Outside of this you can try an Apple store to see if they will restore the OS for you ;)

This is what I've used. Near the bottom of the page, there's a list of supported distro's (it's a tab). Windows is listed in "Other".

YUMI

That is the BE efi. It isnt something to worry about. BE creates a linux partition for the iso and Winblows doesnt see linux partitions.

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On a side note while BE is good, if you like to try other distros or Distrohop you might want to look into Ventoy. I have a 128GB USB with 10 to 12 iso's from Manjaro to PoPOS and even Win7 and 10. I switched over to it and now use it exclusively unless I need persistence. Not to mention it keeps them all in an easy to find place without taking up storage on my systems.

The style and way that you do things with your computer. See it like comparing Windows to MacOS, but I'm not talking about apps or games that can run on each machine, but the way it looks and how you interact with it.

In Linux, we call these Desktop Environments or DEs and we have a lot to choose from: KDE Plasma, Gnome, XFCE, LXQT, Pantheon, Elementary, Deepin, Cinnamon, Mate and many others.

In the end is a matter of taste, pick what DE you think looks great and try it out on a USB with a live image. That's another beauty of Linux, you don't have to install it to test it, you just need a USB (or a DVD if you want) and with an app like Balena Etcher you can see if that distro is right for you. Just remember that distributions (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Manjaro, etc) most of the time come with different desktop environments, so even if you don't like a particular DE you can try another within the same distribution.

PS: maybe this video will help you understand things better and have a quick look of the different desktops.

Cheers!

http://www.easy2boot.com -- it actually works without all the fiddling and allows you to have multiple versions of the same iso without freaking out like YUMI. And you don't need to do anything for a new iso except copy it to the drive.

> Just try several distros from a bootable USB drive

Ventoy is great for this. Copy image files to the USB stick and when you boot from the USB you get a menu of all the images. Doesn't work with everything, but anything that can boot from UEFI should work. Toss a bunch of Linux distro images onto one stick and try them out.

When people say "recovery disk" or "Live CD", they don't necessarily mean the physical metallic donut. They're all referred to as disks and CDs for historic reasons, but nowadays you'll write a live CD to a USB instead. Use rufus or a similar program to write a the live CD's disk image to your USB and make it bootable. Go into your BIOS, configure the boot order to boot from the USB before anything else, and reboot.

If your BIOS supports it, you could probably even boot from a miscoSD or a blue-tooth connected drive if you really really wanted- its not limited to physical CDs. That's just terminology.

I use a usb3 64GB flash drive running Easy2Boot with all of my isos on it. It took me maybe 20 minutes for initial setup and now I can just add isos and execute a batch file on the drive to get it good to go. http://www.easy2boot.com/

What you want is a Live USB with persistence. This will have some reserved space where you can save documents and customize the OS.

More info:

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/en/help/faq/persistence/67-what-is-persistence

If you remove the drive you will not be able to fix it... so don't do that lol.

You do need to figure out how to access either the bios or the boot menu. Modern computers boot very quickly so you probably need to be holding the key down when you press the power button.

You can do this from the Windows install disk and the command line but it's much much easier if you have another computer and a usb key that you can erase (or a dvd you can burn).

I'm recommending Linux here because you can do it from the GUI with a few clicks of your mouse

You can dl Linux Mint here... http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2863

You can use this to put it on a usb key.

Try holding different F keys the delete key and the escape key right when you power on the machine. Eventually when you get a boot menu... boot the USB and when you get to the desktop... go into the menu and type

gparted

You should see your main disk labeled /dev/sda most likely and a graphical representation of it

Right click on the large windows partition... should probably be the third partition on the disk and will be ntfs format

Go to manage flags and check the "boot" flag. This is the same as marking the partition "active"

Alternately from Windows you can use diskpart

Boot to install media... go through the screens until you can get to advanced options and open a command prompt. Then

cd boot dir

You should see a program called diskpart.exe

diskpart list disk

then figure out the number and use the number instead of # in the following

select disk #

list partition

figure out the partition you want to make active

select partition # active

then do list partition again to check the flags...

imo the Linux way is easier and less prone to mistakes.

Make sure to use ISOs that has been tested. You can find those versions from here. If you are using a version that haven't been tested, they will ignore your questions😁

You can download an ISO file directly from Microsoft here, make it bootable using Rufus, and then activate it with whichever method you prefer.

Why? Why make it so hard on yoruself? Just use Ventoy. You can build a Ventoy USB from anywhere... and then just drop whatever ISOs onto the data partition. You don't need a Windows PC, you don't need the Media Creation Tool, you don't need to fight with making bootable USB sticks, etc. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

General advice would be the larger capacity drives are faster, because they can write to multiple banks in parallel.

The really small ones (Sandisk Ultra Fit et al.) can run quite hot, because they can't dissipate the heat. They are convenient though.

You may want to look at one of the tiny linux distros, for example Pupply Linux or Porteus Linux.

These allow you to boot the entire OS into memory, entire meaning a couple of hundred megabytes at most. When that's done, you run everything from RAM, and only on demand it will flush writes back onto the usb stick.

If you can tolerate the nerdiness and the somewhat outdated design, please take a look at Easy2Boot: http://www.easy2boot.com/make-an-easy2boot-usb-drive/

This allows you to prepare your stick so it can run multiple OSes from the same usb device. It takes a minute or so to format, and afterwards you can just throw ISOs into a directory.

It initially runs from Windows, and even contains a small emulator (think vmware lite) to test things out.

This video on youtube should give you an impression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO1xdJCywwA

Good luck on your quest.

Yes, it's an old Pentium 4, but it should easily be fast enough to run Windows 7 fluently. But I'd rather fulfill his request to install Linux, since this OS will most likely not catch as many malware as an unlicensed copy of Windows.

Use this tool. It's very easy, easier than any other method. The program can download any Linux distribution and automatically perform all the necessary steps to create a working USB installation medium. Don't expect a current version of Ubuntu to be lightning fast however. For speed I'd recommend Xubuntu, a light derivative of Ubuntu. It's very fast and can be locked up easily so that he can not ruin the system again. Despite being very resource friendly, it lacks no important features and even looks great.

A good way to test the waters, is to download Ubuntu. Use one of the USB tools to put it on a usb-stick. Then boot from that stick. Try it out. Give it a look.

Simple instructions

1: Download pendrive for windows, which will help you create a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu on it.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/#button

This tool will help you download Ubuntu and put it your USB stick. So it's all you need.

2: Put the USB in your laptop/pc

3: Restart your laptop/pc

4: Press the magic key (F8/F10/Esc) when you see your bios flash.

This will show you a list of all drives. Pick your USB drive.

5: Now you get into an Ubuntu desktop, without even installing it. It just runs from the USB stick.

6: If you like it, in the Ubuntu desktop, there is a big 'install' button. Click it.

7: By default it will suggest to install itself next to windows. So you can choose which one to start at launch.

Have some fun. There are things that are way better on Linux. There are things that are worse. Make up your own mind.

An alternative is the official Ubuntu Windows Installer

This is a windows installer, that will install Ubuntu, except rather than giving Ubuntu it's own partition, Ubuntu just gets a big pre-created file on your windows drive. This works like this:

1. Install the Ubuntu Windows Installer:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/windows-installer

2: Follow the wizard.

3: Reboot, you can now pick which OS to launch.

It is simpler: you don't have to divide your hard-drive in two or something like that, but it is a bit slower.

All too familiar, sorry man! I’ve made it into a habit to make an image backup once everything is configured and running correctly (I know too late now but for future reference).

Win 32 Diskimage for Windows

Apple Pi Baker for OSX.

It's insanely easy to set up.

The hardest part is honestly getting the right program to make the USB installer.

This has always worked out well for me. Good luck. If you like the mac interface I'm sure you'll like the Ubuntu one.

If you have any questions you can PM me!

https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/

http://www.easy2boot.com/

Useful tools are a relative.

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standard iso stuff is on there. but i also keep all of our latest bios flashes for the systems in production so i can flash a system with no/failing image.

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I also keep a portable apps folder with various apps that i can use on a user systems if i really need it.

You can either install Windows in a virtual environment like Virtualbox. Or you can use tools like Ventoy to create a USB stick with which you boot the Windows iso file and install Windows as a second operating system on the computer.

Wine is not a suitable tool for this purpose, as it allows you to use individual Windows applications under Linux but not an entire operating system.

Hard to say. I'd check kernel logs first, then update the driver's firmware t the latest version, before doing anything else.

Looks like LVFS doesn't have Samsung firmwares currently, but I've always been able to download bootable ISOs with a Samsung updater. I should probably check if there's a newer version, and if it boots from inside Ventoy.

If Fedora Media Writer fails on your Windows PC, I suggest you download the ISO file directly and then write it to the USB via the Rufus tool.

Reinstall Windows has been the ultimate fix for weird problems forever.

I recommend Rufus for copying the ISO onto a bootable USB stick. https://rufus.ie/en_IE.html

Windows 10 media download link https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

The .eu link looks sketchy. Very few legitimate websites use the .eu domain, unless it's something very specific to Europe. Also very few legit websites use a hyphen in their name.

Good of you for asking before you download.

The actual website is https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Recently switched to Debian from OS X. There are sole helpful guides, search DebianOn. Duel boot works fine. You can use TimeMachine to backup your old system and restore if needed. I recommend having a solid backup and 2 USB sticks, one with whatever Distro (search Debian USB on OS X) you want and one with OS X (http://diskmakerx.com) before you start doing anything. You can get a USB to ethernet adapter on Amazon relatively cheap. You with have to wrestle with drivers for a in to get WiFi working on the Linux side. I ended up reinstalling my system a few times after various mistakes. You will learn a lot should you choose to be diligent. Internet searches are your friend. Good luck.

Have you tried out easy2boot? I use that on mine. It's set up similar to yours but supports Windows ISOs as well. I'm mostly doing remote support right now so haven't had a ton of opportunities to use it but the times that I have it's worked great.

Trying Linux is very easy. You don't have to get rid of your old OS, you don't even need to dual boot. With LiLi you can make a live USB in no time at all and run linux off that without touching your hard drive!

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

Left for Dead two even has a native port for Ubuntu that reportedly has good performance.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/how-does-left-4-dead-2-perform-on-ubuntu-1304-compared-to-windows-8.2457

As to the distro, Ubuntus Unity is made with a heavy touch screen focus!

If you are on Windows:

• download LiLi

• download the ISO you want

• choose persistence size (maximum 4GB if I remember correclty)

• accept and wait for it to finish

Now you can take you USB key to different places and boot from it in any computer that can boot from a USB (most computers nowadays)

I'm a big fan of Yumi for my multiboot needs.

Current live-CDs on my USB:

• AVG rescue CD
• FreeDOS (balder10)
• CloneZilla
• DBAN
• Gparted
• Kali
• Ubuntu 15.04
• ntpasswd

Other software on there:

• ADTidy
• CCleaner
• CryptoLocker Removal tools
• Delprof
• KeePass
• NotePad++
• Putty
• Recuva
• Swiss File Knife
• Sysinternals

Other items:

• BIOS updates for most systems in my environment.
• Documents and forms for various uses (pretty handy to have a resume or a contract on you in emergencies).
• Scripts for various purposes.

The USB-key is with my car-keys so I practically always have it on me, but I haven't really needed it for a while.

I like Ventoy too and I really like the concept, however Ventoy with Secure Boot doesn't work well on many systems. As the developer says:

Secure Boot was supported from Ventoy 1.0.07, but the solution is not perfect enough. So, from ventoy 1.0.09, an option for secure boot is added in Ventoy2Disk.exe/Ventoy2Disk.sh and default is disabled. So, by default, you need to disable secure boot in BIOS before booting Ventoy in UEFI mode.

If you want, you can turn it on when installing or updating Ventoy. For Ventoy2Disk.exe in menu Option-->Secure Boot for Ventoy2Disk.sh it's -s option.

If you run into some error after turning it on (for example Linpus lite boot failed error), maybe the solution doesn't work with your machine, so you need to turn off the option, and disable secure boot in BIOS.

If it works well with your machine, that's good news. But you still need to do as follows for the first time.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_secure.html

A few ideas:

Are you sure you downloaded the USB Installer Image and not the DVD ISO? Note: this link is copied from the tails installer page just to use as a reference, but regardless, I don’t encourage anyone to download it directly from this link.

Consider trying Etcher to create the USB from the Installer Image. It’s recommended in the tails installer page.
It’s pretty simple, few less options than Universal USB Installer.

Does your USB key have a second partition? Some manufactures include a “convenient” extra partition with some tools. Make sure you fully erase your USB key before installing.

The process for installation is the same.

Download the ISO file from somewhere.

Use this to create a bootable USB drive and install it.

Read this for how to activate it afterwards.

As a fellow person that Windows Update fucked over last week, let me explain what you have to do.

Get Rufus. Rufus is free. Go with 3.5, and 3.13. You might need both, at least I did.

Rufus 3.5 has an option to download an Windows 10 ISO, directly from Microsoft, but unlike the creation tool, you can choose the version you want.

You'll want to go back. 2004? 1909? Choose whatever was most stable for your system.

Then create a new installation media with your new ISO through Rufus, and make a clean install of a stable windows version. If it fails with 3.5, try with the new version. You'll need a USB stick of at least 8GB that will be formatted.

Installation process is straightforward. Boot from the USB, follow the prompts.

20H2 is fine for my 10 year old intel machine. 20H2 broke my current build, most likely M2 related. 20H2 also had some weird bugs for my Laptop.

Do not use the creation media tool for a new install. In my experience the clean install of 20h2 was even more broken than the update I did.

This issue occurs if the computer was registered with an Apple ID that was different than the one you are attempting to reinstall with. I'm not sure if this is deliberate on Apple's part, but using the original Apple ID seems to solve the issue for people.

Failing that, you will need access to another Mac. You can use DiskMaker X to create an installer out of an external drive and a copy of OS X downloaded from the App Store.

What I did in the past:

Download the 10.9 installer from the store on your machine (obviously you need to install it first). Use DiskMaker X to make a bootable USB (http://diskmakerx.com/). Wipe and install without being asked for your ID.

Any sort of tool like this won't work with UEFI at all. The ONLY Mutiboot tool out there to my knowledge that works flawlessly with UEFI is Easy2Boot. There's one or two that can do a single drive boot with UEFI and BIOS, but you can't put more than one payload on that USB at a time.

This one is pretty simple to create and there's methods for installing it on Winderp$ as well as Linux, but it's recommended to prepare the USB on Winderp$, after that you can use Linux to add more to it or modify settings, etc.

If someone knows of a better solution by all means tell me. A major drawback with this tool is that for UEFI compatibility you need two copies of the .iso, one being the original and the second one being a .imgPTN for UEFI compatibility. The creator claims that you don't need the original .iso, but I can't seem to get it to work on BIOS with just the .imgPTN. Might be a fix, but I'm not sure.

Try building a Linux Live USB (flash drive). Then, boot from that drive. See if the hard drive is recognized in Linux. If it isn't there's more diagnostics that can be run on the Linux side.

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

I personally use this for making my bootable usb drives.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/

For a quick try of most distributions, you can just boot off the USB drive.

If you want to have a more serious play around without fiddling with dual boot, I'd recommend using VirtualBox to setup a virtual machine.

I'd recommend starting with Ubuntu, or maybe Linux Mint.

A software version that works almost as well as the hardware versions is Ventoy.

East2Boot has been around longer, but trying to figure out how to build one from Linux drove me to drink.

> said it didn't support some newer UEFI machines

No particular reason for that comes to mind. I'm interested in exactly why that would be.

Just use balena etcher. It's a really easy to use tool on Linux. You can download it from the website if its not in the repository. https://www.balena.io/etcher/?ref=etcher_footer

It won't work for Windows usbs though but I don't think any usb tool on linux does, if we are just talking about gui at least. Good luck.

So there's a few things here:

1. You need to be a part of the microsoft insider program to get a proper version for 3B+ right now specifically - for the love of god don't just download a client from somewhere, causes more hassle than it's worth.
2. You need to access the download here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsiot the site will prompt you if you're not an insider.
3. Once you have the package downloaded, you can use a program like Etcher: https://www.balena.io/etcher/ to properly flash a SD card or USB to boot from.

As a side, you won't get an insider providing you with a link. It doesn't work like that as you get a unique download link while logged in, which then needs to match up with the Microsoft ID you use when logging into the client itself.

Just as a quick edit, going into the page there's currently this build:

"RaspberryPi 3B+ Technical Preview Build 17661"

However, it's an unsupported technical preview, so they have it as a build but it's not gone through much in the way of checks. For context, current main IoT build is marked version 1809 (Jan 2019), so the 3B+ build is a few versions back development wise.

You'll find you can't really use the main builds that are generally easier to access, just as Microsoft makes them compatible only really for Raspberry Pi 2/3 boards, not B+.

> "The Raspberry Pi 3B+ has limited compatability with Windows 10 IoT Core. Please view the release notes for more information. For a more complete Windows 10 IoT Core experience, please use a Raspberry Pi 3B, DragonBoard, Up2 Board or NXP device."

I don't know how to solve your problem, but you can create a Linux Live USB key for free. Just download a file iso of a distribution that supports the live mode and create a Live USB key with Rufus.

For example, you could download the iso of Ubuntu from here.

This sounds like you copied the image file to the SD card. This won't work. Assuming you using windows, download and run a copy of Win32DiskImager. Once Win32DiskImager is running, Select the drive letter that corresponds to the SD card and the extracted image file of the OS. Then click on the Write Button. Once it finishes, put the SD card into the pi and plug in the USB cable to give it power.

I had a hell of a time trying to do it myself back in summer of 2020. couldn't even get online for months thanks in part to pandemic lockdowns.

this is what ultimately worked for me and has been working nearly without fail ever since and the few failures I had were because of usb failures.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

I've had problems with Rufus for the past year, so I've started using balenaEtcher to create my Linux flash-drives instead. That's also open-source, and I find it much more user-friendly.

Also, double-check that you have secure-boot disabled in your BIOS boot settings.

Windows 10 Home/Pro .iso download from Microsoft

Rufus bootable media creator

Now all you need is time (the .iso takes a minute) and a USB key.

If you boot into recovery mode (Cmd - R while booting) you can use disk utility to wipe your drives and then it will download a fresh copy of El Capitan and install it.

You could also use Diskmaker X to create a bootable usb fob of El Capitan (using the copy you downloaded from the App Store) for a fresh install.

http://diskmakerx.com/

Enjoy!

You would probably have a better experience by doing a clean install of Yosemite. I would try that first.

Regarding the browser, I hope you use Safari. Google Chrome is known to be pretty slow/power hungry. (Not slow to render webpages, but it makes the computer slow.)

Regarding startup speed, it might be an old disk working a bit slower now because of corrupted blocks or similar. Perhaps buy a new HDD or SSD?

But yes you could install 10.6 again, but you will probably need to to a complete wipe of your disk. At least wiping your disk is what I recommend. You could have a look at http://diskmakerx.com to create a installer USB, but the easiest would probably be to use original DVD install media.

Yes, but you have to convert the .iso to a FAT32 .imgPTN file using another piece of the E2B toolkit, MPI (Make Partition Image). It's pretty easy, unzip MPI to a folder, run the "Make Shortcuts.bat" file, then drag and drop your .iso on the FAT32 shortcut. Then you can swap the E2B drive to the .imgPTN file and boot from it in UEFI, and switch back to E2B when you're done. Tutorial here.

Just want to throw this out there, Rufus is nice for a single ISO but Easy2Boot blows it away in every other aspect.

NTFS partitioning so you can use a single partition for data and ISOs. Drag and drop ISOs to a folder and the boot loader will read the folder to build the boot list on the fly, no need to config a boot list manually. Windows boot options, I have Win7, 8, 10, server 2012, 2016 ISOs on one thumb drive.

I used easy2boot to make a bootable USB stick. I have a bunch of ISOs on it, including Memtest86, Kali, fresh Ubuntu, etc. It reads them on startup and lets you choose what to boot in.

I'd reccomend creating an E2B USB (http://www.easy2boot.com/) You can load multiple bootable images of os's/utilities as well as being able to put your own tools on there and browsing to them once you boot into an OS.

I've often used Linux Live USB Creator to make bootable Linux USBs and it's worked. It doesn't seem to be in much development anymore, but supplying it an ISO works fine. I'd recommend the option to format the key, and skipping autorun and persistence in the advanced settings.

Why not use Unetbootin, or Universal USB Installer, and write a ISO to a 4GB flash drive? You can get one at walmart for like $6.

Download Virtualbox and try it in isolation. There are lots of guides out there on how to install Ubuntu (or any distro) in VB. Alternatively, you can install it to a USB stick with this, which makes it very simple. Reboot with the USB stick connected and boot from that. There is an option to start Ubuntu 'live' rather than install it.

You'll almost certainly still want to keep Windows around even if you like Linux (especially if you're a gamer), but you can always dual boot. Again, plenty of guides out there.

For installing Windows from a USB, see here.

Most motherboards do not have onboard Wi-Fi. You will need something like this for wireless capability.

It really used to not be as simple, but it has improved to be at least on par with Windows in terms of ease of use. If you're thinking about switching, I recommend getting the core version of Zorin 9 here. It goes out of its way to behave similarly to Windows, and as a result is a great starting point for someone considering switching over.

It is very simple to set up with a bootable usb using this and the iso you downloaded from the Zorin page.

It comes with a bunch of useful tools, too, like GParted (which I have used to salvage completely corrupted drives before) and PlayOnLinux (which makes using Windows programs through Linux WINE super easy).

If you'd like help with it, feel free to pm me! :)

Don't ask if you should use Linux, try it for yourself and see if you want to use it.

Download the live ISOs for a bunch of popular distros, Distrowatch is a alright place to start, then use this to burn each image to a flash drive, then boot from the flash drive and try the distro without installing it over your current Windows installation.

Even if you eventually do switch to Linux, you won't on the first day you try it.

Universal USB Installer at Pen Drive Linux has been my go to for flash drives for a while now. It's updated frequently and hasn't failed me in a bit...

Your options will be either YUMI or MultiBootUSB. You could also look for something along the lines of the Zalman ZM-VE350, an external hard disk you can upload iso files to to boot from.

My personal favourite however, is a rooted android phone with a 64GB(or other size) microsd card and run DriveDroid (DriveDroid allows you to boot your PC from ISO/IMG files stored on your phone.)

First, get on another computer and get an ISO burner, like this one: https://unetbootin.github.io/ (or another one, it doesn't matter).

Then, download an iso file for a linux distro like ubuntu: https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Next, get a usb stick and format it. Then use the ISO burner to make a bootable usb stick with the ISO file.

Now plug in the usb stick to the broken computer, go to the bios boot menu by pressing f11 (or f2 or f12 depending on the motherboard).

Boot from the usb stick, select "try ubuntu before installing" from the GRUB boot menu, and attempt to recover your files.

Unless you've encrypted your disks or your computer is really messed up, you should be able to boot and view your files through the explorer, which should be enough for you to copy them to an external hard drive or put them on dropbox or something.

After you back up your stuff, reboot the computer, create a liveCD of the operating system you want to install (probably windows), boot from it and put in your liscence key and copy your files back

1 - You can make a flash drive with persistence to save files on your drive and keep them over sessions. I use UNetBootin: https://unetbootin.github.io/

2 - It's only a terminal you can run, so it won't be the same experience. Try using cd /mnt/c to access you C drive.

Have you looked into how you can try Linux?

If you're not sure whether you will like Linux it might be best to try it from a Virtual Machine or a LiveUSB before taking the plunge to a full installation.

The Virtual Machine may be far easier to set up initially. Install the program and create a new Virtual Machine, and the program does a pretty good job on guiding you through that stage. This will allow you to run a full Linux computer as a program inside Windows so you can play with it and see how it works in a safe environment.

With a LiveUSB, or a full install, you may need to configure your computer's UEFI to allow booting from a USB stick, and may also need to turn off some features and protections the UEFI provides (such as SecureBoot and, in some cases, Intel QuickBoot). Whether you have to do this, and how this is done, may vary from machine to machine. Once this is done, it should allow you to boot a LiveUSB, which will run a full Linux from the USB stick. This will run much faster than Linux as a Virtual Machine on Windows, as Linux will be able to address the full power of the computer directly.

A more modern version of that idea is Ventoy, which can boot both modern uefi and older bios based machines . Put the iso into the partition and it will show up on boot.

I had the same problem. From what I read, the issue lies in the fact that POP does not play well with GRUB. (that may or may not be the case, I'm no expert. But the article recommended the following...)

I had to use Balena Etch to make my USB. once I did, the install went through very smoothly.

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Nitpicky, but since you asked: you don't "burn" an ISO to a flash drive, you image it.

An ISO is a copy of a data disc. Imagine a huge ZIP or RAR file, only one that also includes disc information (such as if the disc is bootable). The reason Linux has been distributed on ISO forever (and Windows more recently) is because you can download a single ISO file from a vendor and burn that image to a CD or DVD, or image the file to a flash drive using something like Rufus. The alternative would be to download all 4,575 files from the Windows 10 Pro CD from Microsoft individually and hope you set up all the files and folders correctly.

Wouldn't it have been easier to just use Win32 Disk Imager to create an image of the SD card? It's pretty much always listed when searching for writing and reading images off SD cards, especially in the Raspberry Pi realm.

Anyway, really cool video. Probably one of my favorites of yours. Long-time viewer here :)

On the partitions: You can put it all in two. One for everything, and one for swap. But people recommend files and boot and even OS on a different partition to make changing it easy. My UEFI has the bios boot, the uefi boot, the OS, files, and swap all on separate partitions. I also like and have my files on a different drive so all OS operations to disk get their own cache and don't chunk down when loading big files from HDD while loading the program its self, too. To avoid accidental formatting in Arch, use Antergos or just quadruple double check your mounts when mounting partitions and such. Do an "lsblk" and write down the drive letters E.g. /dev/sda = HDD, /dev/sdb=SSD, /dev/sda1=EUFI, /dev/sda2=BIOS, etc. Mount them like it says in the install guide, confirm with the paper doubly, and should be okay. The only thing that can enable formatting the wrong one is yourself.

And you should partition the blank spaces on the drive with Windows, you should format the actual partition in Arch, or just do what I do and use a Linux Mint Live USB and format them using gparted. You can do it in Linux completely at any step, but I don't like not doing the Windows partitions in Windows.

And yes, you can have them. Post the chipset info here and we'll tell you what to expect, and then how to make it work. It's pretty simple today, and most chipsets do just work now. Only a few older ones, or bleeding edge ones are trouble. You can get this info from the Mint live USB also.

Use win32 disk image writer to write the USB. In Linux you use DD or setup a multiboot USB. https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/

I've written a TON, and I mean a ton of Arch isos. Use Win32DiskImager in windows to do it... never ever.. and i mean ever fails.

If it does.... you have bios settings issues.

NTFS won't work, it needs to be FAT32 if you're using that tool.

Alternately you can use win32diskimager to write the iso the the USB drive. **this will erase everything on the drive**

> Do I load them directly onto a flashdrive, plug it in, and boot it via external?

Sort of. You can't just copy the files over, though, you have to burn them to it as if the USB drive were a CD. https://rufus.ie is a great tool for this; alternatively if you want to boot multiple at a time you could try https://ventoy.net.

> I accidentally toasted the hard drive when I overloaded the system with Windows 10. . . oops.

Ow. That happened to my old teacher's laptop too. And it was a pretty good one.

> will I tank the system by loading a Linux distro onto it like I did with Windows 10?

You'll probably be fine. The main thing to make sure with something like that is that you have adequate cooling on the CPU and good physical connections to all the "peripherals", but you should be good.

> I've also got two other desktops (that aren't my daily driver Windows 10 desktop). I don't remember what models or which Windows OS they're running, it's been a hot minute since I last booted them up, but I think I'd like to load them up with Linux too, potentially different OSes to play around with. Any suggestions for those?

Start with what you've got; honestly I'd say just play around with what works on that laptop you mentioned and and you can scale up from there. You may find that trying to do multiple things on multiple devices is somewhat confusing.

> I don't ever expect I'll be good enough to do this as a job, but for a hobby, I feel I could do a lot worse. . .

It's a great hobby. Welcome to the club.

Someone else will have distro suggestions for you; I won't bother with them right now. Eventually you realize that distro doesn't matter, but until then, it's an intensely personal choice and anyone who disagrees with you is a terrible person. But whatever.

Erstmal Linux Distro deiner Wahl (z.B. Ubuntu) auf einem bootbaren USB Stick installieren und auf dem Laptop hochfahren. Wenn auch das Probleme macht liegt ein Hardware Fehler nahe, ansonsten würde ich an der Stelle direkt Daten auf eine externe Festplatte sichern und Windows neu installieren, bevor du dich dumm und dämlich suchst.

Rule 1 of this subreddit:

>This is not a support forum! Head to /r/linuxquestions or /r/linux4noobs for support or help. Looking for a distro? Try r/findmeadistro.

But to give you a short answer: I think Linux Mint works quite well for beginners, specifically the version with the Cinnamon desktop.

You can download it and then load it onto a USB thumb drive with the tool Rufus. You can test it without installing it or making any changes to your existing Windows system.

Also, just to clarify: "Types" of Linux are called distributions or "distro" for short.

Not sure where the dmg came from, but I would do this:

If you have access to another Mac, you could log into the App Store with your iCloud credentials and download El Capitan. After that, download DiskMaker X to build a bootable thumb drive installer out of the El Capitan download from the App Store.

If you have Yosemite installed, you've already got a bootable Yosemite installer; hold command+R on startup to access it.

Otherwise, yes, you can use a partition as a bootable installer. Use DiskMaker X.

Google Drive link: Mavericks
Download the entire folder.

And in case you need to make a bootable USB drive: Diskmaker X