ubuntupenHow many of you have faced the problem of installing Ubuntu on your machine because the CD or some such optical media was not working properly on your machine. The problem could be because of the bad media or a really old over used CD/DVD drive. Moreover, I think we have reached a stage where we don’t need such optical media. At least it’ll help reduce the usage of plastic. Another reason is that pen drives/USB diskettes have almost become commodity hardware.

Unless you have the luxury of an image of Ubuntu on your network drive or a good CD to boot from, you are in trouble to install Ubuntu on your machine. However, all hope is not lost because you can create a live disk just like a live CD of Ubuntu using your pen drive. Most of the new machines support the option of booting from USB device. However, if you have a legacy system which doesn’t support booting from USB, then I am afraid but you better have a good CD/DVD drive along with a function live CD of Ubuntu to get things done.

Today we’ll see how to create a live USB Ubuntu disk, just like your live CD. Only difference is that we’ll be booting and installing Ubuntu using this live USB diskette.

Note: Please note that I have tested this with Ubuntu 8.10 or Intrepid Ibex but I am sure earlier versions will be no different. However, it’s advised to run an updated version of Ubuntu on your machine especially if you are in the category of home user.

Let’s get started! What are we gonna need?

  1. A USB drive (1 Gig or more). Make sure to backup any data from your USB drive as we are going to format it in the process.
  2. An ISO image of latest release of Ubuntu. In my case it is Ubuntu 8.10 or Intrepid Ibex. Make sure you have the right image and have checked it against MD5 checksum. I am using the image named ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso.
  3. A machine that supports installation using USB.
  4. You’ll also need a software called as unetbootin-windows-304.exe, which you can download from here.

Let’s see what unetbootin software does:

UNetbootin allows for the installation of various Linux/BSD distributions to a partition or USB drive, so it’s no different from a standard install, only it doesn’t need a CD.

You can check other features and supported platform at the home page of Unetbootin.

Steps

Creating a bootable USB disk of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex

The process is to extract files from Ubuntu 8.10 onto the USB disk and install bootloader on it so as to make it bootable.

1. Download Unetbootin and iso image of Ubuntu 8.10.

2. Start the program, Unetbootin.

unetbootin

3. Just select the location of your Ubuntu ISO image file and make sure USB drive is selected in “Type” dropdown along with the right drive letter if your USB. Something like below:

unetbootin2

4. That’s all. Click Ok and the process should start. Depending on your machines capability this might take a few minutes.

5. After the process is complete you can exit Unetbootin.

unetbootin4

That’s it you have successfully created a live USB disk of Ubuntu 8.10. You can now boot using this USB and use the USB drive as a live Ubuntu disk or use it to install Ubuntu on your hard drive. All you have to do is to make sure that you have enabled USB boot option in your BIOS and that at the boot menu you have selected boot using USB. From the boot splash menu of Ubuntu you can choose to use the live disk to play around with Ubuntu or to install Ubuntu on your hard drive.

A quick note

You have to make sure that your USB drive is an active partition. To do this in Windows. Open command prompt with admin rights.

1. Enter DiskPart by typing the following at command prompt

diskpart

listdisk

2. Check the number of your USB drive by typing

list disk

listdisk1

3. Now you have the list of devices. Make a note of the disk number for your USB disk. In my case it is Disk 1

4. Now enter the following commands one by one to make your USB drive as a active and your Ubuntu partition as an active partition.

select disk 1
select partition 1
active

That’s all now boot your machine making sure you are booting using USB at the boot option. Everything post that is like using a live Ubuntu CD.