Rufus is a very popular free and open source portable application for Windows operating systems that can be used to easily create bootable USB flash drives. Thanks to its active development, new editions are released regularly, which contain many new features. In this tutorial, we will try Rufus version 4.3 and use it to create a Debian 12 installation flash drive.

If you use external USB drives and storage devices, you can safely disconnect and disconnect them in the graphical desktop environment of your Linux system with a few clicks. Devices issued in this way will no longer be accessible, as the associated block device names will be lost and the hardware will be de-energized. By default, we can only re-use hardware by physically reconnecting it, which requires human intervention. There may be a need to still have access to our software-disconnected, turned-off storage device without having to physically unplug it and then reconnect it. If for any reason you want to be able to access your logically disconnected and unplugged USB storage device, this tutorial will look at how to restart and make available your external HDD, flash drive, or card reader without having to physically reconnect it.

When you connect an external USB drive or flash drive to your machine, the Linux system will automatically mount its file system for the appropriate user. However, this automatic mount may fail for some reason and you will get a small window with an "Not authorized to perform operation" error message.

A system recovery flash drive is a bootable device that can be used to save damaged file systems or perform maintenance on them when the operating system is unable to start due to the damage, or even to recover a broken GRUB if it is not working properly. In this description, we will make and test a recovery flash drive, which will not hurt if you are always lurking in your pocket in case there is any problem with your computer later.

Balena Etcher is an open source freeware program that lets you conveniently create bootable flash drives for computers and bootable SD cards, for example, for Raspberry. In this tutorial, we will try this powerful utility that offers the ability to create bootable flash drives on both Linux and Windows platforms.

In this tutorial, we create a bootable flash drive on Debian using two methods: Using unetbootin and then using the dd command.

Here's how to make a bootable flash drive with the new 3.3 version of Rufus.

This tutorial describes how to use the Rufus program to write the operating system setup image files to USB flash drives.