How to create bootable linux USB flash drive via CLI?

This post will show how to create a bootable Linux USB flash drive from the terminal and using just a dd command. It's required that you have downloaded an ISO of your choice, I'm going to use Fedora Workstation 32 ISO as an example. In my case it is required to have a Linux machine (20GB disk) and at least 2GB USB flash drive. Depending on distro it can be different. I prefer this method because it's easy and I don't need to install any additional software for that.

Create a bootable USB flash drive

1. Insert USB flash drive into the USB port.
2. Find the name of the USB drive. For that I found the easiest would be to use an lsblk command. This will output something like that:

1[aaron@dark-side ~]$ lsblk
2NAME                            MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
3sda                               8:0    1  14.6G  0 disk
4├─sda1                            8:1    1   1.9G  0 part /run/media/aaron/MediaUSB
5├─sda2                            8:2    1    11M  0 part
6└─sda3                            8:3    1  22.9M  0 part
7nvme0n1                         259:0    0 232.9G  0 disk
8├─nvme0n1p1                     259:1    0   600M  0 part /boot/efi
9├─nvme0n1p2                     259:2    0     1G  0 part /boot
10└─nvme0n1p3                     259:3    0 231.3G  0 part
11  ├─fedora_localhost--live-root 253:0    0    70G  0 lvm  /
12  ├─fedora_localhost--live-swap 253:1    0  11.8G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
13  └─fedora_localhost--live-home 253:2    0 149.5G  0 lvm  /home
14[aaron@dark-side ~]$

In that case USB flash drive is dev/sda, it can be different in your system. To identify the correct drive I usually check the size of the drive. This has been a good enough identifier.

3. Unmount USB flash drive. For that I'm going to use unmount command.

1sudo unmount /dev/sda1

4. Flash Linux ISO to a USB flash drive.

1sudo dd bs=4M if=/path/to/linux.iso of=/dev/sda status=progress oflag=sync

Make sure to use a correct device path and don't append partition number - In my case simply /dev/sda is enough. Also, replace /path/to/linux.iso with a path to Linux ISO file in your system.

When this command finish successfully then everything is done. Reboot the system and start installing :) Depending on a system you may need to configure your BIOS to boot from USB.

Summary

In this post I described a system of how I create a bootable Linux USB flash drive. I have only tested this flow with some distros and it seemed to work in every case. If you have any questions, suggestions then let me know in the comments below.