Using a pre-prepared USB stick image

The Spectrum requires a USB stick to be formatted with the FAT32 file system along with a Master Boot Record (MBR) or at least one partition. We recommend using a USB stick that is less than 32GB in size as only a maximum of 32GB can be used.

Recent versions of Windows will attempt to use exFAT or NTFS instead of FAT32, especially if the USB stick of a high capacity, which can make formatting a USB stick correctly difficult.

An alternative to formatting a USB stick yourself is to flash one of the pre-prepared USB stick images below onto your USB stick, using a tool such as Balena Etcher.

Using a pre-prepared image

  1. Download one of the disk image files below, chosing one that is smaller than the maximum capacity of your USB stick.

  2. Unzip the image to give you an .img file.

  3. Install a USB flash tool such as Balena Etcher onto your PC, Mac or Linux PC.

  4. Use the flash tool to write the .img disk image onto your USB stick.

WARNING - Flashing a disk image onto your USB stick will erase all data. If you proceed with this approach you do so at your own risk!

4 GB USB stick image 3.40 MB
SHA256 checksum: 073355bc87347d165a13eff7fd6cb0af4cceee8cc67ff57973084dcd17f9d909

8 GB USB stick image 7.28 MB
SHA256 checksum: f2ffe8a764459c7dcf9017b5855fd005ffab1d8bbd2876b5eba3de01886a8c40

16 GB USB stick image 15.04 MB
SHA256 checksum: 0581f1edfc7b9e217f50e5b27819e6483e30b99754dbd0a37be4b83e477abf0e

32 GB USB stick image 30.57 MB
SHA256 checksum: ec4a445e74147d8b9bdd5e57ee725cd139472a516c0bba022e74fa26137dcd55