Overview

Creating UEFI-only booting USB live media is pretty straight forward. Just copy the files to your FAT32-formatted USB drive. That's it!

Remember that for an installation or booting the media:

• You may still need to explicitly tell your computer to boot the media via UEFI.
• A GPT partition table like in preinstallations of Windows 8 and later is recommended.
• Don't forget to create a partition after you've created the partition table.
• Use the latest AMD64 (LTS) ISOs, because these definitely contain UEFI bootloaders.

• Copy files from the ISO method
  1. Example via terminal
  2. Example via GUI
  3. Example on Windows
• The ISO loopback method (advanced)
  1. Creating the binary
  2. Creating the configuration file
  3. Adding persistency
  4. Checking the integrity
  5. UEFI Secure Boot
• Review in 2020

1. Copy files from the ISO method

This method also works for other install media that contains EFI loaders, like Windows for example.

1.1. Example via terminal

You can do something like the following if 604A-00EA is your USB drive and you already have p7zip installed:

$ 7z x ubuntu-12.04-desktop-amd64.iso -o/media/$USER/604A-00EA/

You're done if you have only one partition on this USB drive, otherwise you need to flag the partition as bootable e.g. via parted:

# parted /dev/sdX set 1 boot on

Where /dev/sdX would be your USB drive and 1 the partition number that should be used to boot.