Burn a .ISO file to a USB drive via Terminal or in Disks application

Tutorials & Guides
1

You don't need any additional software to burn a .ISO file to a USB drive, Zorin OS has what you need.

First, you have to figure out what drive is your target drive. You can do that in the Disks application, or in Terminal, you can issue: lsblk

It'll have an output like this:

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 596.2G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part 
├─sda5   8:5    0     2G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sda6   8:6    0     2G  0 part 
└─sda7   8:7    0 591.7G  0 part 
sdb      8:16   1  59.5G  0 disk 
└─sdb1   8:17   1  59.5G  0 part /media/owner/STORAGE
sdc      8:32   1  29.7G  0 disk 
├─sdc1   8:33   1  29.7G  0 part 
└─sdc9   8:41   1     8M  0 part 
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom

sda is the main internal drive, sdb is the target drive I want to burn to, sdc is the ZFS L2ARC cache drive, sr0 is the CD/DVD drive.

Now, I want to burn RescueZilla so I can create an image of the Windows installation on my new laptop, which I'll store away just in case I can't get Zorin OS to work on the new laptop. That laptop is still in the box... never been booted. I don't intend on booting it under Windows.

So again in Terminal, you'd issue:
sudo dd if=/home/owner/Desktop/rescuezilla-2.4.1-64bit.jammy.iso of=/dev/sdb conv=fdatasync status=progress

You'll note it shows the progress of the process, updating once a second.

You'll see an output like this:

2245152+0 records in
2245152+0 records out
1149517824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.1 GiB) copied, 221.74 s, 5.2 MB/s

[EDIT]
First few tries didn't work... still working on it.

[EDIT 2]
Ah, it's a problem with RescueZilla... it won't boot. I tried Clonezilla and it boots and runs properly.

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2

But, if the command line's not for you, you can do the same thing in the Disks application.

Start up the Disks application, select the drive you want, ensure it's formatted to the file format you want and that it's mounted, then click the '3 vertical dots' menu button.

Select 'Restore Disk Image', select the .ISO image you want to burn, and let it burn.

3 Likes
3

That's also a super-handy way of backing up your hard drive to an external drive... just click the '3 vertical dots' menu button, and select 'Create Disk Image', then tell it where to save the image. It'll save as a .ISO file.

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The first time I ever created a Zorin .iso LiveUSB was by using dd command. :wink: I had no idea there were etchers until much later.

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Nope, it won't save the hard drive image as a .ISO file, it'll save as a .IMG file. So the Disk application can work with either .ISO or .IMG file formats when burning from a file to a disk, and it creates a .IMG file when creating a disk image.