Burning bootable USB drives, SD cards etc
2021-05-23 — 2021-05-24
Wherein the competing tools for burning bootable media are presented, POSIX dd is invoked as sufficient, and examples such as Rufus on Windows and Etcher are enumerated, with writable persistent drives being noted.
computers are awful
diy
A short note because I can never remember the name of the contending tools for this task. TBH we do not truly need a specialised app for this; on POSIX systems, there is the dd command which will happily make bootable drives, but sometimes it is nice to have a couple of bonus features, such as making drives that you can write additional files to.
- rufus (Windows) is a boot drive maker which is free and open source and maintained and thus possibly less suspect than some competitors.
- balenaEtcher
- UNetbootin still seems to work but is somewhat suspect and gives warnings if you use it for e.g. Debian.
- popsicle: Multiple USB File Flasher is, I think, Linux only and seems to be simple.
