As described in my previous blog post I had a problem getting USB on a flash drive to boot due to the PC simply saying “Missing Operating System” when it tried to boot from the device.

I found a fix for this that basically involved wiping the flash disk using fdisk. Creating a new partition and using usb-create again. The solution is explained step by step below :

The first step is to load fdisk. To do this you need the following simple command :

sudo fdisk /dev/sdg
Obviously you need to point it to the correct dev file where the USB flash disk is located. In my case it was /dev/sdg.

Once fdisk has loaded you need to delete the partition that is on the disk. This can be done by typing ‘d’ and then hitting enter. (If you want to check at any time what the state of the partition table is on the disk you can type ‘p’ and hit enter.)

This hasn’t actually deleted the partition yet. In order to write the changes to the drive you need to type w and hit enter. (Beware this will effectively wipe the drive so make sure you definitely have the right disk…)

So now you have a nice blank USB drive to use. Of course it now needs a partition to be able to write the Ubuntu image in when you run usb-creator. Start up gparted and right click on the unallocated partition. (Again, make sure you have the right drive selected in the top right hand corner of gparted or you could wipe off a hard disk by mistake.) Click on new and select Fat32 for the file system type. Write these changes to the USB drive and you are are set.

Now all that is left to do is fire up usb-creator, write the Ubuntu system to teh flash drive and stick it into the PC you wish to load and boot it up. Simples…

Over the years I have played around a few times getting either a Linux distribution or FreeBSD to run from a flash drive for a number of reasons. Last night I had the need to do so again to install Ubuntu on to a machine without a CD drive of any kind installed.

Before I started messing around setting up the MBR etc I decided to do a google search to see if others had done this and written a nice tutorial. To my surprise I found that ubuntu has a package named ‘usb-creator’ available that automates the process for you.

All you have to do is download a Ubuntu iso and it can mount it, prepare your flash drive and install it for you.

I also found out there are a number of tools now available to automate the process for different Linux distributions as well as BSD. The ones I have come across so far are :

UNetBootin
Live USB Creator
iostick.sh (Shell Script)

Despite these tools however I installed Ubuntu to the stick using usb-creator and when I went to boot it I got “Missing Operating System” displayed on the host PC. I am in the process of trying to rectify this at the moment so if and when I find a work around I will post the results here.