Today I downloaded ISO file of Ubuntu MATE 15.04 from https://ubuntu-mate.org/vivid. Instead of installing the OS on my disk, I thought to first try it live from USB. So, to try it live, I need to make my USB bootable. In Windows, making a bootable USB is very easy. Univeral USB Installer is my best tool to do the job. But in Ubuntu, I have never created a bootable USB. So I googled for the instructions and came to know that Startup Disk Creator and unetbootin are some recommended tools in Ubuntu for creating bootable USB. I tried them but unfortunately, it didn’t work for me. So, I searched for dd command since I had used this tool to write Raspbian OS img file on my Raspberry Pi 2 B and came to know that we can use dd command to make USB bootable.
So, first I formated my USB to NTFS file system and then typed the following command in terminal.
sudo dd if=input.iso of=/dev/sdbwhere input.iso is ISO file of your downloaded OS and /dev/sdb is your USB device. It took around 8 minutes to complete and I was able to make my USB bootable.