Once you’ve picked out your drive, the first thing you’ll need to do? Format your drive as FAT32. That’s right, the software we’re going to use requires the FAT32 file system, so right-click on the drive and select Format from the menu.
Choose FAT32 from the drop-down menu under File system, and then click Format.
To create the custom drive, we’ll use a small piece of software called SARDU, which combines a bunch of functionality into a single package—you can use it to download the ISO images, write everything to the USB drive, or create an ISO image that you could burn to an optical disc—though obviously you’re space-limited in that case.
Once you download and extract SARDU, you can simply start clicking on any of the buttons to trigger a download of that rescue disk.
There’s a whole bunch of utilities included, including really useful ones like Gparted and the System Rescue CD, Ophcrack, and others.
And you can use it to directly download Ubuntu as well.
Or you can download the ISO images separately and put them into the ISO folder (you’ll have to restart the application once you’re done).
All done? click the Make a USB button over on the right-hand side…
And everything will be created and copied to the drive.
Just plug the disk into an available port, and choose the option to boot from USB—you may have to take a trip into the BIOS settings to enable booting from removable drives, or you might have to hit a key during bootup to display the boot options menu, where you can choose the device to boot from.
Once you do successfully boot from the flash drive, you’ll see a menu like this:
Select any of the categories, and you’ll see all the rescue disks or other disks that you’ve put on your drive:
Enjoy your awesome rescue disk.
