Boot Ubuntu From a Flash Drive

Last Updated: Wed, Feb 25, 2009

Why?

Booting from a Live CD is great but it doesn’t leave you with an environment where you can save your configuration. With a computer with a modern bios you can boot to usb flash disks. This allows us to boot into environments and save data back to the flash drive. With Ubuntu we can make a customizable enviornment that we can take around with us on our flash disk.

Having Ubuntu on a portable medium like a flash disk enables us to be able to do all sorts of useful things. We can use it as a way to take your familiar development environment to a friends machine. We can use it to get rid of viruses on a Windows machine. Or, use it to recover lost files. The uses are endless.

Installing Ubuntu to a Flash Disk

Go to: System > Administration > Create a USB startup disk

You will then need to type in your password.

After this plug in an empty USB flash drive and put in a live Ubuntu CD or ISO to copy from.

Select the proper USB device and the proper amount of reserved space for documents.

Then click Make Startup Disk.

After it is finished just restart your computer and set your BIOS so boot from USB.

To get into your BIOS settings see your motherboard manual or look on your screen on boot for a key to enter setup. From here look for the boot priority settings and move USB towards the top.

If all is well you should be able to boot into your newly created USB flash disk and be able to update/add programs and start customizing your persistent live install.