How To Create An ISO From A Bootable USB Drive In Linux

We all know how to create a bootable USB drive from an ISO. We have already covered it twice using dd command and Etcher utilities. However, we are going to do it reverse. Yes, In this brief tutorial, we will see how to create an ISO from a bootable USB drive that we created already. This will be very helpful when you lost your actual ISO image and wanted to create an additional bootable drive.

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Create An ISO From A Bootable USB Drive

This can be easily done using GNOME Disks . As you might already know, Gnome Disks is a graphical utility to manage disk drives and media. It provides the necessary utilities and applications to deal with your storage devices. GNOME Disks comes pre-installed with some linux distributions by default. If it is not installed, you can install it as shown below.

On Arch Linux and its derivatives:

sudo pacman -S gnome-disk-utility

On RHEL, CentOS, Fedora:

sudo yum install gnome-disk-utility

Or,

sudo dnf install gnome-disk-utility

On SUSE/openSUSE:

sudo zypper in gnome-disk-utility

Once installed, plug your USB drive in your system. Then open GNOME Disks utility either from Menu or Unity.

The default interface of GNOME Disks will look like below.

I already have CentOS 7 bootable USB drive in hand. You can refer the following link to create bootable USB drives and SD cards as described in the following link.

Etcher A beautiful App to create bootable SD cards or USB drives

Select the bootable USB drive from the list. And the click on the three horizontal lines on the top right corner.

Choose Create Disk Image .

Choose the name and the location where you want to save the ISO image.

Now, GNOME Disks utility will start to create an ISO image from the bootable USB drive.

That’s it. You now have your actual ISO image back. Like I said, this will be helpful if you have lost your ISO image. Just plug your bootable drive, open GNOME Disks utility and create ISO in minutes. Don’t lose the bootable USB drive. Then, you have to download the ISO from Internet.

Cheers!