To prepare the USB stick, you will need 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 CD and DVD images can now be written directly a USB stick, which is a very easy way to make a bootable USB stick. Simply choose a CD or DVD image that will fit on your USB stick. See to get a CD or DVD image. Alternatively, for very small USB sticks, only a few megabytes in size, you can download the mini.iso image from the netboot directory (at the location mentioned in ). A special method can be used to add firmware to the mini.iso. First, write the mini.iso to the USB stick. Next obtain the necessary firmware files. See for more information about firmware. Now unplug and replug the USB stick, and two partitions should now be visible on it. You should mount the second of the two partitions, and unpack the firmware onto it. # mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt # cd /mnt # tar zxvf /path/to/firmware.tar.gz # cd / # umount The CD or DVD 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 CD or DVD image file can be written to a USB stick as follows, after having made sure that the stick is unmounted: # dd if=debian.iso of=/dev/sdX # sync An alternative way to set up your USB stick is to manually copy the installer files, and also a CD 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 hd-media/boot.img.gz 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, businesscard, or full CD) 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 a full CD ISO image to it. &usb-setup-x86.xml; &usb-setup-powerpc.xml;