You can easily install Ubuntu from a USB drive. With the latest release – Ubuntu 9.04 – you must be eagerly wanting to give it a try. The benefits of installing Ubuntu from a USB or thumb drive is that you can use the installed version of the operating system on any computer where you can hook up your USB drive, and there are many laptops these days that don’t come with a CD or DVD drive, but you get a USB port everywhere.
You’ll need a USB drive that can store at least 1 GB of data. Format it in FAT32 format. Then you download the appropriate Ubuntu ISO image from the website. If you are using Windows XP then you probably require the 32-bit version. Download it and save it somewhere on your computer.
After this download a cool software utility called UNetbootin. It not only installs all the Ubuntu files on to the USB drive it also makes it a bootable drive. Now, you may already be knowing that whenever you want to boot from a device that device must be bootable.
You can run UNetbootin as an application and when you run it you come across this screen:
Be careful when you are choosing the drive because otherwise you may end up losing your data.
You may decide to instruct UNetbootin to first download the ISO file from the Ubuntu server and then install it on the USB drive, or you can choose to install it from a pre-downloaded ISO file. The information pretty much looks like this:
That’s it. Click OK and it starts doing its job. After this when everything is complete, it’ll ask you to reboot. Make sure in your boot setup you have set up the USB drive as the first bootable drive. When you have booted, you’ll be presented with different options and you can choose accordingly. From there you can easily install Ubuntu on to your PC or laptop.
