Ubuntu on USB Drive

There are many reasons that you might want to put a distro, like Ubuntu, onto a portable medium like a flash drive that will allow you to run it even on computers that have no or a non functional CD-ROM drive. There are many different ways to do so, many covered when you download one of the images from ubuntu.com.

Windows

On windows there are a few options for making a bootable USB flash drive, here are the ones that I personally prefer. When on windows I always opt for the graphical way of doing things. The way that is recommended by Ubuntu is to use USB Installer from pendrivelinux.com. There are a multitude of other options to try if this does not work.

 

Linux

On Linux my preferred way to make a bootable USB drive is to use the terminal command dd. dd is a program that should be installed on most if not all of the standard packages for modern Linux distributions. To use it you will need to know 2 things, the name of the ISO file that you are trying to burn and the exact location of the USB drive in your computer. By this I mean the name given to it in /dev/. As a short explanation: everything on in the Linux system is seen as a file, all of the physical devices are represented by files in the /dev directory in your file system. Usually flash drives are something like sdX where the X could be any alpha character. To determine this location I use the program gparted which will list all of the drives that are currently plugged in to the computer. The command to write the ISO to the USB is as follows: dd if=/home/sam/Downloads/<name of ISO file> of=/dev/sdX. On many distributions, like Ubuntu it will be necessary to use sudo when executing this command because of the safety  restrictions installed on the system.