Is Creating a Bootable USB Drive Permanent?

More specifically, I want to know if when I put the Ubuntu OS on my flash drive if it is permanent or not. As in,can I delete the Ubuntu installation files after I install it on my computer and use it as a regular USB again? I just want to install Ubuntu on a unformatted hard drive and then be able to use my USB like normal again.

Sorry, I know I must sound very redundant. Thank you for the help.

After installation, you can use Disk Utility to reformat the USB drive so that it will work like normal again. The method for doing so can be found in this thread How to format a USB drive?

While everyone's answer is technically correct that you can reuse it, it is not always the best answer.

You really need another way to boot computer to make repairs or in an emergency. If not at home and system crashes a live flash drive install can let you keep working and probably access data on drive. Without a repair tool you are out of luck.

If dual booting with Windows you should buy another small flash drive and create another repair drive for Windows.

Then for the data you may want on a flash drive buy a larger one, depending on how much data you have.

Also if you use the dd procedure to create flash drive you have to use dd to zero out MBR as the dd procedure does not create a standard MBR,only then can your create a new partition table and formatted partitions.

Germar wrote:

Nope. You can always reformat your USB again and fill it with what ever you like.

Unfortunately that's not my experience. It seems that most flashdrives (including Kingston) can be made bootable once, and they will work OK, but the problem comes when you try to reformat them ready for burning a new .iso on to them. I've destroyed two flashdrives this way; something (but I'm not sure what) happens to their boot sector and they become read-only and can't be reformatted. I've tried a whole host of different tools to try and resurrect them without success.

I've posted some details of all this at this tomshardware page. It seems that the boot sectors on different flashdrives are all different and proprietary, and they react in different ways to having an .iso burned on them. Some people have reported they've been able to successfully reformat and re-burn new .iso's on to their flashdrives, so I know it's possible to do this with some brands, but I need to know which ones. Before anyone burns an .iso on to a flashdrive, they should find out what brands allow this process to be recycleable and which ones don't.

If anyone has info on this branding issue, please post it on the above tomshardware url or e-mail me directly on [email protected]. Meanwhile I'm trying to find out which flashdrive brands support making them bootable, and which ones don't. especially since I've discovered the hard way that Kingston don't.

This is not true, I used a generic 8 Gb flash drive as a boot for Kali and the space it took is not able to reformat, I've tried everything I've found online to remedy this and its stuck. I tried reformatting and making it a Ubuntu drive and it just boots to Kali again. So it appears I'm stuck with a Kali boot USB drive...

EDIT: Delete the partition, reformat https://www.all4os.com/windows/properly-delete-a-partition-on-usb-drive-using-diskpart.html