Creating UEFI-friendly USB installer experience

**currentshaft** · 1 Week Ago

I'm trying to create a bootable USB drive for a new computer.

The traditional method of using dd has mysteriously failed and the new computer does not recognize the USB drive.

I thought about creating a UEFI compatible installer and searched for instructions.

The first result is https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/create-...tick-on-ubuntu which on Step 3 says:

"We’re going to use an application called ‘Startup Disk Creator’ to write the ISO image to your USB stick. This is installed by default on Ubuntu, and can be launched as follows:"

I do not have "Startup Disk Creator" on my fresh Ubuntu 24 LTS installation.

Search for more information and apparently I need "usb-creator-gtk".

So I install that, launch the app and use it. I exit the app and unplug my now-working USB drive.

Except now every 60 seconds, I get a pop-up on my screen: "The application Startup Disk Creator has closed unexpectedly".

If I click on anything on the dialog, I get a full-screen dialog asking for my password.

This has not been a good experience.

**BBQdave** · 1 Week Ago

This is the current recommended method to create a bootable USB Stick for Ubuntu: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install...top#1-overview

**oldfred** · 1 Week Ago

I do not like dd as we see too many users specify wrong device & destroy data on drive they really want to keep. And of course those users never have backups.

Many have suggested all of these:
balenaEtcher, rufus, & Startup Disk Creator
mkusb
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb
Some of above are dd with some extra questions to make it a bit safer.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/iso2usb

If only UEFI boot required, you can just extract ISO into a FAT32 formatted flash drive with esp,boot flags.
I created a temp partition (sdb2) as ESP on a much larger drive where I did not want dd to erase it.

Code:

sudo apt-get install p7zip-full
p7zip Note no space after -o 
7z x [ISO_NAME]  -o[DESTINATION_FOLDER]
sudo mkdir /media/fred/temp
sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /media/fred/temp
sudo 7z x ~/ISO/kubuntu-22.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso -o/media/fred/temp
sudo umount  /media/fred/temp

But I normally use grub2's loop mount to boot ISO in my ISO folder. I have multiple ISO and do not then have to create a flash drive for separate partition for each.
ISO boot & link to examples
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot
more examples
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Gr...OBoot/Examples
Originally getting path & boot parameters correct were the biggest issues.