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2020-12-23

Burn an ISO to USB with the Chromebook Recovery Utility



There are a number of fantastic Windows applications for creating bootable USB drives from ISO images - but those don't work on a Chromebook. Fortunately there's an easily-available tool which will do the trick: Google's own Chromebook Recovery Utility [1] app.

[1] Chromebook Recovery Utility

Normally that tool is used to creating bootable media to reinstall Chrome OS on a broken Chromebook [2] (hence the name) but it also has the capability to write other arbitrary images as well. So if you find yourself needing to create a USB drive for installing ESXi on a computer in your home lab (more on that soon!) here's what you'll need to do:

[2] reinstall Chrome OS on a broken Chromebook

Install the Chromebook Recovery Utility [3].

Download the ISO you intend to use.

Rename the file to append `.bin` on the end, after the `.iso` bit:

Image: My renamed ISO for installing ESXi

Plug in the USB drive you're going to sacrifice for this effort - remember that ALL data on the drive will be erased.

Open the recovery utility, click on the gear icon at the top right, and select the *Use local image* option:

Image: The CRU menu

Browse to and select the `*.iso.bin` file.

Choose the USB drive, and click *Continue*.

Image: Selecting the drive

Click *Create now* to start the writing!

Image: Writing the image

All done! It probably won't work great for actually recovering your Chromebook but will do wonders for installing ESXi (or whatever) on another computer!

Image: Success!

[3] Chromebook Recovery Utility

You can also use the CRU to make a bootable USB from a `.zip` archive containing a single `.img` file, such as those commonly used to distribute Raspberry Pi images [4].

[4] Raspberry Pi images

Very cool!




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