Installing Ubuntu from USB

Ubuntu is one of the most recent and most popular versions of Linux whose design motto is 'Linux For Humans'. Ubuntu is very flexible in terms of media through which it can be installed in a computer. In this article I explain how to install Ubuntu from USB flash drive. This method of installation is the only way you can install a Linux OS on a netbook which has no optical drive.

Installing Ubuntu from a USB eliminates the need for burning installation CDs. The method for Ubuntu installation from USB described below works for Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu as well.

How to Install Ubuntu From USB

I assume in this article that you have a preinstalled Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 version on your computer and you want to install and boot Ubuntu from a USB. The latest Ubuntu installation CD has a USB bootable disc creation tool. So if you have a machine with a CD drive you can use the Ubuntu installation CD based tool to prepare a bootable USB. There are many ways in which you could install Ubuntu from USB flash drive. I explain the simplest method here (based on Windows) that will get your job done in a matter of minutes. Let me present the outline of the procedure. There are three parts of this process. First you need to prepare the USB flash drive by copying the Ubuntu ISO image to the drive and then reboot the computer from the USB flash drive to run the installation.

Prerequisites For Ubuntu Installation From USB
You will need the Ubuntu Live CD or an ISO image of the latest Ubuntu version. Check that your computer satisfies the basic Ubuntu system requirements. Another obvious necessity is a USB flash drive with at least 1 GB storage capacity. You will need to download two software programs. One is the '7-Zip' which is a free compression program available online. It can handle most types of compressed files. Another program that you'll need is Syslinux which is a bootloader that will make the USB flash drive bootable. Now let us see how to install Ubuntu from USB jump drives.

Format USB Drive
Insert the USB drive in the appropriate port on your running Windows system. Right click on the USB drive icon in 'My Computer' and select the 'Format' option. Make sure that you select the file system to be FAT32 and not NTFS! This is essential as the installation does not work with an NTFS formatting.

Install 7-Zip & Syslinux
Install the latest version of the 7-Zip program. Using 7-Zip you need to first extract Syslinux from its compressed form. To do that, right click on the downloaded file and choose the 7-ZIP extraction option and extract the file to the desktop. Rename the extracted file folder as 'syslinux'.

Now you need to open the 'Windows Command Prompt' program and type 'cd Desktop/syslinux/win32'. To install syslinux, type in the following command: syslinux - ma [USB Drive Name]:

Create a Bootable USB Drive
Next locate the ISO image of Ubuntu and right click on it to extract it on your hard drive. Simply copy and paste the extracted folder of the Ubuntu ISO image to the formatted USB drive. Copy all the files from the isolinux folder directly to the USB drive folder. That is, if the drive name is H, then transfer all files from H:\isolinux to H:\. With that, your job is done, your bootable USB is ready. To boot from USB restart the computer and set the bootable drive to be USB drive. To do this you will have to press F12 and change the boot options through the BIOS screen. Once this is done, you can install Ubuntu from the flash drive to the hard drive or use it to boot into Ubuntu directly.

Hope this article has left you in no doubt about how to install Ubuntu from USB. There is a program called Unetbootin that has been specifically designed to create bootable USBs. You could alternatively download that program and create your Ubuntu bootable USB flash drive directly.