A bootable USB Ubuntu drive can be created with USB creator that comes pre-installed on any modern Ubuntu distribution.
Before starting you will need the following:
- A USB drive with at least 700 MB in size.
- Either an ISO image or the Ubuntu Live CD. You can just download a fresh copy from the Ubuntu site.
- Once you have everything you need, you are ready to go.
You will find USB creator in the Administration sub-menu of the System menu on the GNOME desktop. The entry you are looking for is called “USB Startup Disk Creator”. Click that to open up the main window.
Now insert your Ubuntu CD or, if you’re using a downloaded image, click the other button and navigate to where you’ve saved your image file.
When you insert your CD it will be automatically detected by the system and list it in the USB Startup Disk window.
At the bottom you will notice the only option available is for saving documents and settings. If your USB drive has enough extra space you can designate a portion of that drive for this purpose. With this feature you can effectively have a portable version of Linux that is far more than just a “startup disk”.
When you have selected your image to use and configured your free space you are ready to go. Click the “Make Startup Disk” button. During the creation process you will see a progress window that will let you know how much is done and what is happening. There are three phases of the creation process:
- Copying Files
- Creating persistence file
- Making persistence file system
Once these phases are complete you will get a dialog window telling you installation is complete and you can now reboot your machine with the USB drive. Of course when you boot a machine with this device it has to be able to boot from a USB device. Most modern machine can do that so it shouldn’t be an issue.