Burn an ISO to a USB stick

Several of the Debian CD and Debian Live images are created using isohybrid technology, which means that they may be used in two different ways:

• They may be written to CD/DVD and used as normal for CD/DVD booting.
• They may be written to USB flash drives, bootable directly from the BIOS of most PCs.

The most common way to copy an image to a USB flash drive is to use the dd command on a Linux machine:

dd if=file.iso of=/dev/device bs=4M; sync

where:

• file.iso is the name of the input image, e.g. netinst.iso
• /dev/device is the device matching the USB flash drive, e.g. /dev/sda, /dev/sdb. Be careful to make sure you have the right device name, as this command is capable of writing over your hard disk just as easily if you get the wrong one!
• bs=4M tells dd to read/write in 4 megabyte chunks for better performance; the default is 512 bytes, which will be much slower
• The sync is to make sure that all the writes are flushed out before the command returns.