The problem#

You know how to make a bootable flash drive, but you want to actually use it to install a permanent operating system (OS) onto your computer.

The solution#

Luckily, modern OS installs are very straightforward. Just download the installation image (e.g. Debian Linux or Windows 11), put it on a flash drive, boot off it, and click "Next" a few times and wait a bit. The defaults will usually erase all data on the computer, but if it's a new computer, there's nothing to erase.

Of course, you can make things more complicated if you don't like the defaults, have a special situation, or just want to know more precisely what's going on.

The details#

The problem#

Last week, I talked about making bootable flash drives, but didn't go in depth about why you might want to do so.

The solution#

Bootable flash drives have a lot of different uses. The most common ones are simply dealing with an operating system that fails to boot or installing an operating system on a computer that doesn't have one. But there's also some cases where it's useful to not be using the main OS even if it is functional.

The details#

The problem#

So you've built a new computer with fresh blank storage. How do you actually do anything with that computer that has no software? Navigating the BIOS menus can only hold your interest for so long.

The solution#

The old way of doing things was to have a bootable CD or DVD, but now that most computers don't even have an optical drive, the common way to handle this with bootable USB flash drives.

Most Linux distributions' default download is an image for a bootable "live" flash drive (or DVD) that runs the OS in addition to having an option to perform a permanent install. Some of the most popular ones are Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora.

You can boot Windows off a flash drive using Hiren's BootCD, which also includes a lot of recovery and diagnostic tools.

While most boot drives will boot into Linux or Windows, there's a small set of specialized lower-level tools. One very useful one is Memtest86+ (included in many Linux distros), which will determine if your RAM is functional. As bad RAM can cause very weird and different to track down problems, you should always test new RAM.

The details#