Create Bootable Debian 10 USB Stick on Linux

To experience the Debian 10 Buster operating system features, you should know how to create a bootable USB stick from the Linux terminal using the dd command. In this post, we would talk about how to create a bootable Debian 10 Buster USB stick. This bootable USB stick can be used to boot and install Debian on any computer that supports booting from USB.

Prerequisites#

• Computer running any Linux distribution
• USB stick drive with 1GB or larger storage capacity
• Debian 10 Buster ISO file. You can download at Getting Debian page, we are using the 64-bit PC netinst iso file.

Creating Bootable Debian 10 USB Stick on Linux#

Perform the below steps to to create a Bootable Debian 10 USB drive:

First of all plug in the USB flash drive into the USB port.

After that, find out the name of the USB drive using the lsblk tool:

lsblk

It should show something like below:

sda      8:0    0 931.5G  0 disk 
 ├─sda1   8:1    0 465.7G  0 part /
 ├─sda4   8:4    0     1K  0 part 
 └─sda5   8:5    0   3.9G  0 part [SWAP]
 sdb      8:16   1  14.8G  0 disk 
 └─sdb1   8:17   1  14.8G  0 part /media/tecnstuff/Sony
 sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom

In above output the USB drive is /dev/sdb but it can be different on your system. You can identify it’s size.

Generally, the USB drive will be automatically mounted when inserted in Linux systems. Before going to next step for flashing the USB drive, ensure that the USB is not mounted. If it is then use the below command to unmount it:

sudo umount /dev/sdb1 

At last, you need to flash the the Debian ISO image to the USB drive. Execute the below command:

sudo dd bs=4M if=/path/to/debian-10.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso of=/dev/sdb1  status=progress oflag=sync

In above command, Make sure you replace /dev/sdb1 with your drive and do not append the partition number. You should replace the /path/to/debian-10.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso with your actual path of iso file.

It will show progress bar while it is being flashed. It will take some time depends on the size of ISO file and speed of USB stick. Once it has been completed, It will show the output as following:

83+1 records in
83+1 records out
348127232 bytes (348 MB, 332 MiB) copied, 30.015 s, 11 MB/s

Congrats! You made a bootable Debian 10 on your USB stick.

Conclusion#

You learned how to create a bootable Debian USB stick using the dd utility. Now you can use the USB stick to install Debian on your another systems.

If you have any question or suggestion, please leave a comment below.