Installing Ubuntu 16.10 onto a usb flash drive for my lenovo yoga 14(wont boot from flash drive)
I've been able to install it onto a flash drive and it will boot on my desktop computer but it wasn't so intuitive. I selected the flash drive in the bios and it said the OS was missing. However I found another option I didn't recognize and it booted from that on my desktop. On my Lenovo laptop it only shows the usb drive as an option and when I select that it says the os is missing. I can run live linux flavors off the usb drive just fine. When I installed Ubuntu I formatted the entire drive as ext4 and set the partition as my root folder. Otherwise just the standard install onto the flash drive.
EDIT: Well I have an update here. Looks like the flash drive wont even run live linux anymore. Idk if something from samsung was deleted when I formatted it that was critical to the proper operation but Samsung wont provide any support for it. Can I possibly run grub off the hard drive and have it load up the OS installed on the flash drive?
1 Answer
Yes you can run grub off the hard drive if you are using Ubuntu.
I added the following menuentry to my hard drive grub.cfg:
menuentry "ubuntu.iso" {
set root=(hd1,1)
loopback loop /ubuntu.iso
linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz.efi boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/ubuntu.iso noeject noprompt -- persistent
initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lzThis will boot a 64bit Ubuntu iso named ubuntu.iso located on a flash drive at sdb1, on my computer. adding Persistent to the entry allows saving data, downloads etc from boot to boot on a partition named casper-rw located on the portable or internal drive.
You will need to tweek the menuentry to suit your personal needs.
I think it is normally recommended to put the menuentry in a custom grub file but I prefer just adding it to grub.cfg so if anything goes wrong I just do a sudo update-grub
1
