Gord Nickerson

Bootable USB Stick and Ubuntu 11

It's taken awhile but i've gotten to like 11.04 but there is one function from 9.04 that i truly miss. In the older version you could easily create a bootable usb stick by selecting System, Administration, USB Startup Disk Creator which automated the process.

That is now gone and the Startup Disk Creator just installs a bootable 'LiveCd' on your USB stick which is not the same thing. A google search reveals lots about installing Ubuntu from a USB but nothing much on installing a real system to a USB. Eventually i figured it out and the process is logical as it is the same as any manual install, but it takes more work than the old USB startup disk creator functionality.

In case someone has to do this here is how i did it. This process used an 8 gig usb stick and the 32bit desktop LiveCD for widest compatibility, a larger stick is better. I decided to create 4 partitions and to use all the space on the stick.

Boot a computer with the LiveCD. This requires your boot priority to have the optical disc 1st. If the Live CD does not boot check your BIOS boot settings (press DEL or F1 or F2 or F10 at startup to enter the BIOS)

When Ubuntu has started insert your USB stick and double-click the Install Ubuntu 11.04 icon

Tick the Install 3rd Party Software checkbox and click FORWARD

At the Allocated Drive Space dialog select the Something Else radio button and click FORWARD

This displays the drive partitioning tool which is used to manually set up Ubuntu. A single existing hard drive in the computer is listed as /dev/sda  formatted as NTFS. Your USB stick is listed as /dev/sdb1 with a FAT32 partition and a size of 8018mb


Select /dev/sdb from the Device for boot loader installation pull-down menu and then select your USB stick (/dev/sdb1) and click NEW PARTITIONTABLE to wipe out any existing data

You need to create the following drive partitions:

/boot which is the boot partition. This is where programs critical for booting the system reside
/ which is the root directory. Programs used for running the OS are installed here
swap which is reserved disk space for use as virtual memory
/home which is your home directory for storing files

Select Free Space under /dev/sdb and click ADD to display the Edit Partition dialog. Type 128 in the New Partition Size text box, select /boot from the Mount Point pull-down menu and click OK

Select Free Space under /dev/sdb and click ADD to display the Edit Partition dialog. Type 2000 in the New Partition Size text box, select swap area from the Use As pull-down menu and click OK

Select Free Space under /dev/sdb and click ADD to display the Edit Partition dialog. Type 3000 in the New Partition Size text box, select / from the Mount Point pull-down menu and click OK

Select Free Space under /dev/sdb and click ADD to display the Edit Partition dialog. Type 2891 (or whatever is the remaining space) in the New Partition Size text box, select /home from the Use As pull-down menu and click OK

Click INSTALL NOW to being the Ubuntu installation process

When the Who Are You? Dialog is displayed type in your full name and choose a name for your computer like gnickers, enter a username and a password and select the Log in Automatically radio button
Click FORWARD and Ubuntu is installed to your USB stick (this takes awhile....)
When complete Remove the LiveCD and press ENTER to restart the computer to the USB stick