After creating a hand full of Windows installation USB Drives over the years, I wanted to make a Ubuntu installation USB Hard disk rather than burn the image to a DVD. The main benefit from installing from a USB Hard Disk is the speed the OS installs, it is considerably faster than a DVD installation and older flash drives. Plus you don’t need a working optical drive which isn’t always available.

There are many other ways of writing linux images and all of them are better. The ideal way to do this is using Rufus (https://rufus.ie/) which is much easier to use, gives you more options and is a lot safer to use.

I was feeling difficult and decided to try a different way

First stop was to try Win32Diskimager but it was unable to see USB Hard drives, only SD Cards and Flash Drives

So the next step was to grab a copy of dd, a linux tool that has been ported to Windows (chrysocome.net – download)

Although not very pretty, dd on windows is similar to how you use it on linux, with the exception of the paths for your physical drives and partitions

It is not quicker

It is not better

It is much harder

But it works