Tips for Creating a Bootable USB Drive

Creating a bootable USB drive for installing Linux is a very handy thing that can be done. For instance, I have a laptop which I just wiped out and it is pretty much a dead computer right now. I have one other laptop which is a netbook so I can not download and burn a bootable live CD to install Ubuntu onto my real laptop which I just killed. One thing the netbook and my laptop both have, however, are USB ports!

This is an instruction on how to install Ubuntu Linux via a bootable USB flash drive. This how to will not only work just for Ubuntu but also for a number of other popular Linux distributions. To start off you will have to download a nifty little program called UNetbootin from here.

Once downloaded run the .exe and it is fairly straightforward from here. Once the program is open the top radial button should be selected and from the drop down next to it you can select which distribution you would like to create a bootable USB flash drive for. I chose Ubuntu but you can pick Fedora, Mandrive, mint Suse etc. there is a whole list of them. basically this program UNetbootin makes it very easy for you to make a bootbale flash drive out of any Linux distribution. After selecting the distribution you want to use, in the next drop down you can select which version of the distribution you want. I chose Ubuntu 10.04 which at the writing of this is the latest stable version of Ubuntu. UNetbootin has version of Ubuntu all the way back to 6.06 so you have a lot of choices in versions of each distribution.

Now the interface may be kind of confusing of UNetbootin but if you just want to make a standard bootable USB flash drive from a standard distribution of Linux then there is no need to worry and you can skip all the other confusing options and just click "OK" and let the magic work!

But if you click "OK" and it says it can not find your USB flash drive and you actually do have one plugged in, then this means you have to reformat your flash drive which is super simple so do not worry if you don't even know what that means. Here is what we need to do to format your USB drive.

First open up "My Computer" and look for your drive. Once you find it right click it and select format and select "fat32". Once it quickly reformats your USB drive restart UNetbootin and make your distribution and version selections again and then click "OK" and this time it should work!

Once you click "OK" the program will run and start downloading the iso for the distribution you picked and create your bootable USB drive!

Now that your bootable USB flash drive is created it is time to test it out. If the computer you created the USB bootable flash drive in is not the computer you wish to boot into Linux like in my situation I mentioned in the beginning them remove it from your computer and plug it into your other computer. Make sure the computer is off with the USB plugged in and turn it on.

Now from here once you turn on your computer it should boot off of the USB flash drive but if it does not you will have to edit your bios and tell it to boot off your USB flash drive. This is different for each computer and can easily be found online for your specific model but for the most part while your computer boots it may say like hit F12 for bios etc. and if so then hit F12 and edit in there. After this you will have successfully created and booted an operating system off a USB flash drive!