Make a USB installation disk of any OS

What is an operating system?

An operating system is a piece of system software that manages the hardware and software of a computer and also provides a base to install and run programs.

The most widely used operating system is Microsoft Windows. It is a proprietary operating system software developed and distributed by Microsoft Corporation. It is very popular because it is very user friendly and easy to learn.

Another popular operating system is Linux. It is an open-source ecosystem which is always supported by a large community and can be downloaded and used without any paid license. Unlike Windows, Linux operating systems can be hugely customized to match your taste.

How to create a USB installation disk? 

Installing and using these operating systems may be a little hectic task for beginners. I will be covering the installation of operating systems in an other series of posts. In this post, I will be covering on how to create a bootable, fully-functional operating system installation disk on USB disks (aka Pendrives) without much effort. We will be accomplishing this task on Windows itself.

Pre-requisites:

1. Rufus

The software that we'll be using is called Rufus. Rufus is a simple light-weight, and an open-source tool to create OS installation disks on USB sticks with less time and effort. Here's a screenshot of the program.

 You can download Rufus by clicking here.

2. The Operating System Image

After preparing Rufus, you will need the main part of the process, an operating system image file. An operating system image is a single file which contains all the necessary installation files combined. It will be usually having .iso extension commonly and for some Linux OS images, it would be .img which is incompatible with Rufus (will be covered in a Linux post).

To get a Windows 10 operating system image, you need to download Windows Media Creation Tool and an active internet connection or you can get the pre-downloaded image from any other website on the Internet.

To get an Ubuntu Linux image, head over to https://ubuntu.com/#download.

Similarly you can download any operating system image.

3. An empty USB disk/pendrive

You'll be needing an empty pendrive of at least 4 GB capacity to create a bootable installation disk of your preferred operating system. The recommended size of the pendrive would be 8 GB since most of the newer versions of Windows won't fit inside a 4 GB disk due to it's real size being around 3.4-3.7 GB. For Linux, 4 GB is okay for most distributions.

The Process

1. First of all, ensure that you have downloaded the files properly to prevent consequences of ending up with an error.
2. Launch Rufus application by double-clicking on its icon.
3. Plug-in your pendrive and see it's being detected on the 'Device' list. If you have multiple devices plugged in, choose the right disk from the selection menu.
   
4. Next, select the downloaded OS image file by clicking 'SELECT' button.
   
   
5. Choose the right partitioning scheme and target system choices depending on your system configuration. For newer systems, UEFI can be used along with GPT and for older systems BIOS can be used along with MBR option.
   
   
6. Click the 'START' button to begin writing the operating system image to the selected USB disk.
   
   
   
7.  You can click on the 'Log' button to see the log to monitor what's happening during the process.

When the process completes, you can boot into installation by rebooting your computer or plugging in the pendrive to an another computer. Enjoy installing your new OS!