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Installing Ubuntu to a USB drive

Installing Ubuntu to a USB drive

I'm having a rough time getting Ubuntu to run from a 250 GB USB hard drive.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 244
Total answers/comments: 3
Guest [Entry]

"I assume from the size of the drive you are talking about, that you are either using a relatively expensive SSD or a spinning-disk based drive (rather than a ""pen drive"" or similar).

If using a spinning-disk based drive then you might find that the problem is due to the controller in the drive's enclosure not appearing to the BIOS as a bootable USB device until such time as the drive has fully spun up. Depending on how long the drive does take to spin up and how long the BIOS to do the rest of its POST. The POST will be shorter then when starting from a power-off state (usually no RAM test and so forth) for a warm boot so the drive has less time to be ready before it is scanned. This would explain you having more luck when power cycling the machine.

Some BIOSes have an option to pause for a few seconds before scanning for drives, to account for this possibility. If yours doesn't (it is less common now than it used to be) then you might have an option to force a full POST even on warm boot."
Guest [Entry]

You need to make sure USB boot is enabled in your BIOS (or that it is even supported). If the BIOS doesn't support boot from USB, you can't keep the bootloader on the USB drive.
Guest [Entry]

"I have just got my USB + Ubuntu installed and running. I had some problems with BIOS scan not detecting the USB port and therefore not booting from the USB device.

A better fix may be to add an option in the default hdd boot-loader
that will 'find and boot' from a USB device."