Parted Magic USB Installer
Writes Parted Magic to a USB flash drive.
The stick it makes is one FAT32 partition that boots on legacy BIOS and on
UEFI with Secure Boot on. Every file is read back and checked before the
installer reports success. The partition table is written last, so a stick
that fails partway has no partition table and is never left half bootable.
The stick stays writable, so Parted Magic's Save Session works on it.
It runs on:
- Windows 10 and 11:
pmusb-gui.exe, in the install folder of the
Parted Magic ISO
- Linux: packages in the same folder (
.deb, .rpm, Slackware .txz)
- macOS 26.5 and later on Apple silicon: an app in a
.dmg, in the same
folder and on the Releases page, signed with Parted Magic's Developer ID and notarized by
Apple
- Android phones and tablets with USB host support: the app on Google
Play
How it is built
One program in Go does the work on every system. It reads the ISO, lays out
the drive, writes the FAT32 filesystem, installs the BIOS boot loader and
checks the result. Parted Magic 26.10_4 and later boot BIOS computers with
GRUB: the installer copies GRUB's boot.img and core.img from the ISO itself
into the first sectors of the drive. Older ISOs get syslinux, as before. An
ISO with no BIOS boot loader gets a stick that starts on UEFI only. The
installer does not check the ISO's name or layout. It refuses an ISO only
when the stick could not boot: nothing on it to start from, or a file of
4 GiB or more, which FAT32 cannot hold. Each system adds a small part that finds and opens USB
drives:
| file | system | how it reaches the drive |
|---|
device_linux.go | Linux | sysfs and the block device |
device_windows.go | Windows | the physical drive handle |
device_darwin.go | macOS | diskutil, and the raw disk opened through authopen |
device_usbfs.go | Android | an Android app cannot open a disk, so this file speaks USB mass storage (Bulk-Only Transport and SCSI) over the descriptor Android's USB API gives the app |
The windows are gui_windows.go (Windows), pmusb-gtk.py (Linux, GTK 3),
mac/ (Swift, AppKit) and android/ (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose). Each one
runs the same program and reads its progress as JSON lines.
Building
Go 1.26 or later. The Go dependencies are in vendor/.
./build.sh: the Linux program and the Windows executablesmac/build-mac.sh CORE OUTDIR [IDENTITY]: on a Mac with the Command
Line Tools. CORE is the program built with
GOOS=darwin GOARCH=arm64 CGO_ENABLED=0 go build. With no IDENTITY
the app is signed ad hoc, for testing on that Mac.mac/release-mac.sh CORE OUTDIR: the release .dmg, signed with a
Developer ID Application certificate, notarized and stapled. Run it in
Terminal on the Mac. It needs the certificate in the login keychain and
a notarytool profile. mac/make-csr.swift makes the key and the
certificate request.android/build-android.sh: needs JDK 17 and the Android SDK
(JAVA_HOME, ANDROID_HOME). It builds the program for android/arm64
and puts it in the app.
Command line
pmusb inspect --source pmagic.iso
pmusb list-devices [--all] [--fixed]
pmusb install --source ISO --target /dev/sdX --confirm-erase [--expect "model|serial|bytes"]
[--label PMAGIC] [--no-verify] [--no-bios] [--json] [--cancel-on-eof]
pmusb install --source ISO --target stick.img --size 3G (image file, for testing)
pmusb verify --target /dev/sdX|stick.img
pmusb upgrade --source ISO --target /dev/sdX --confirm-upgrade [--delete-session] (Linux)
Exit codes: 0 ok, 2 usage, 3 refused by a safety check, 4 device error,
5 verify failed, 6 canceled.
License
The installer is GPL-2.0-or-later (COPYING). It includes syslinux's
installer code and boot loader, also GPL-2.0-or-later. It contains no GRUB
code: GRUB's boot images are read from the Parted Magic ISO. The Android app also
uses AndroidX and Jetpack Compose, which are Apache-2.0, so the Android app
as a whole is distributed under GPL-3.0-or-later (android/LICENSE). The
third-party Go libraries are listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.
Copyright 2026 Patrick J. Verner.
