To prepare the USB stick, we recommend to use a system where GNU/Linux is already running and where USB is supported. With current GNU/Linux systems the USB stick should be automatically recognized when you insert it. If it is not you should check that the usb-storage kernel module is loaded. When the USB stick is inserted, it will be mapped to a device named /dev/sdX, where the X is a letter in the range a-z. You should be able to see to which device the USB stick was mapped by running the command dmesg after inserting it. To write to your stick, you may have to turn off its write protection switch. The procedures described in this section will destroy anything already on the device! Make very sure that you use the correct device name for your USB stick. If you use the wrong device the result could be that all information on for example a hard disk could be lost. Debian installation images can now be written directly to a USB stick, which is a very easy way to make a bootable USB stick. Simply choose an image (such as the netinst, CD, DVD-1, or netboot) that will fit on your USB stick. See to get an installation image. Alternatively, for very small USB sticks, only a few megabytes in size, you can download the &netboot-mini-iso; image from the netboot directory (at the location mentioned in ). The installation image you choose should be written directly to the USB stick, overwriting its current contents. For example, when using an existing GNU/Linux system, the image file can be written to a USB stick as follows, after having made sure that the stick is unmounted: # cp debian.iso /dev/sdX # sync Information about how to do this on other operating systems can be found in the Debian CD FAQ. The image must be written to the whole-disk device and not a partition, e.g. /dev/sdb and not /dev/sdb1. Do not use tools like unetbootin which alter the image. Simply writing the installation image to USB like this should work fine for most users. The other options below are more complex, mainly for people with specialised needs. The hybrid image on the stick does not occupy all the storage space, so it may be worth considering using the free space to hold firmware files or packages or any other files of your choice. This could be useful if you have only one stick or just want to keep everything you need on one device. Create a second, FAT partition on the stick, mount the partition and copy or unpack the firmware onto it. For example: # mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt # cd /mnt # tar zxvf /path/to/firmware.tar.gz # cd / # umount /mnt You might have written the mini.iso to the USB stick. In this case the second partition doesn't have to be created as, very nicely, it will already be present. Unplugging and replugging the USB stick should make the two partitions visible. An alternative way to set up your USB stick is to manually copy the installer files, and also an installation image to it. Note that the USB stick should be at least 1 GB in size (smaller setups are possible if you follow ). There is an all-in-one file &hdmedia-boot-img; which contains all the installer files (including the kernel) as well as syslinux and its configuration file as well as yaboot and its configuration file. Note that, although convenient, this method does have one major disadvantage: the logical size of the device will be limited to 1 GB, even if the capacity of the USB stick is larger. You will need to repartition the USB stick and create new file systems to get its full capacity back if you ever want to use it for some different purpose. To use this image simply extract it directly to your USB stick: # zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sdX Create a partition of type "Apple_Bootstrap" on your USB stick using mac-fdisk's C command and extract the image directly to that: # zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sdX2 After that, mount the USB memory stick (mount /dev/sdX /mnt), (mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt), which will now have a FAT filesystem an HFS filesystem on it, and copy a &debian; ISO image (netinst or full CD/DVD) to it. Unmount the stick (umount /mnt) and you are done. If you like more flexibility or just want to know what's going on, you should use the following method to put the files on your stick. One advantage of using this method is that — if the capacity of your USB stick is large enough — you have the option of copying any ISO image, even a DVD image, to it. &usb-setup-x86.xml; &usb-setup-powerpc.xml;