Installing Ubuntu to a USB drive

Posted by Carl Smotricz on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Carl Smotricz
Published on 2009-12-29T15:30:43Z Indexed on 2010/04/13 10:43 UTC
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ubuntu

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usb-flash-drive

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usb-boot

I'm having a rough time getting Ubuntu to run from a 250 GB USB hard drive.

I booted Ubuntu 9.10 from a CD and ran the regular "install" to the attached USB drive. I used the "advanced" option on the drive partition question to put the boot loader on /dev/sdb (the USB disk) but when I boot the machine it doesn't recognize there's a boot loader on the USB drive (it offers to boot from 2 other devices but not the USB disk).

I also tried booting from the Ubuntu CD and using usb-creator-gtk to set up the USB drive. Seems to me this is meant to work with flash drives. I got a bootable USB disk but it looked and worked like the CD, i.e. it gave me options of "live CD" operation, installing, memtest, etc. That's not the way I want to run the system.

Some help in installing Ubuntu, bootable into a "full" running system on my USB drive would be appreciated.

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