Ubuntu 8.10 USB Drive Review
Posted by beginlinux on November 18, 2008
Ubuntu 8.10 offers a way to create a USB drive from the Live CD or an .iso. The question is, how well does this really work. In order to test we created several of these USB drive installs. The first thing to note is that the process is easy to do. Here is a step by step in create a USB Pen Drive disk.
Insert the USB Pen Drive once you have booted the Live CD. Now go to System/Administration and Create USB startup disk in the menu. You will see it has detected the 2 GB San Disk. You can use as small as 1 GB for the disk. You will also need to indicate the location of the Live CD or an .iso so the system can build the disk. Here we used the Live CD.
It provides you with the option to decide how much free space to allow for files that you create. What this does is give you a way to move this Pen Drive from computer to computer and save your files. A mobile Pen Drive.
Installation process is quick.
Now remove the USB drive and boot from the USB drive. On most computers at boot time you will have an option to choose your boot drive by selecting F12 at boot. Then select boot from USB drive. If all is well the Ubuntu USB drive should boot and you will see the same thing as the Live CD. Your computer must be able to boot from a USB drive, if it does not have that capability it will not work.
Results Were Mixed:
We tried it on a Lenovo T60p and it would not work at all. Error message ” No operating system”. So for some reason it could not read the disk. On a Dell Inspiron 1100 it booted fine. A little slow but you have to remember it is creating the whole operating system off the USB drive initially.
Boycott Novell » Links 24/11/2008: Compiz 0.8; Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha; Fedora 10 Coming said
[...] Ubuntu 8.10 USB Drive Review [...]
Paul Eycks said
I tried this on a dell inspiron 1520 and I get “Invalid or damaged bootable partition”.
DvD said
on thinkpad X41 same error “Invalid or damaged bootable partition”
Greg said
Could not get it to boot on an HP Compaq nx9010 or on a Compaq 6820s, either using the BIOS or while using Smart Boot Manager, but it worked just fine on a Lenovo T61. Using a 1GB Kingston DataTraveler and was created using the method above.
the nx9010 only has an option for “removable devices” and the 6820s only has option for “USB Hard Drive.” The Lenovo actually listed out all the USB devices in it’s boot selection screen, so it seems to be a BIOS deal, rather than a problem with the drive or the procedure.
Greg said
Tried it on a couple of computers once I got home and both were “Invalid or damaged boot partition” = Dell Inspiron 600m and Dell Latitude D600.
John said
Tried it with a generic desktop, HP Pavlion, HP Notebook, Dell and all were unable to locate the kernel. I solved the problem with the “missing operating system” error, widely noted via Google. Also read formatting as Fat16 was a fix but 8.10 insists on reformatting to F32 and there seems to be some evidence to support that as a source of problem in locating the Kernel.
Any more ideas?
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Code Singh said
Just blogged about this, had an issue where the USB stick wasn’t booting up properly. Had to install the master boot record on it after creating the live usb
Mark said
Got this to work on a Lenovo S10 laptop, Dell Optiplex 170L and Gateway 832GM, however I get the “Invalid or damaged boot partition” on my Dell D600 Laptop (using the same usb drive), using the latest A16 BIOS.