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Booting Ubuntu from flash drive

T

Terrador

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 22, 2008
130
0
I am using a MacBook Pro running snow leopard. It is a late 2008 model I think. The LAST model that had a physical mouse button.

I have successfully installed Ubuntu 8 to a flash drive (I also tried Ubuntu 10) and the computer restarted after install as normal. When I held down the ALT key to boot from a flash drive, it did not show up at all. I only had Macintosh as an option.

Help!
 
Are you booting the Live USB, or did you actually install the operating system onto a USB Flash drive from the CD? I've never had any luck with even creating a bootable USB in OS X. Disk Utility never gave me any usable results, and dd in the terminal never worked either. I always made it with Unetbootin for Windows or Linux. And even then, I couldn't boot from it on my Macbook. I've always had to resort to burning a disc.

That probably doesn't help much, but I'm just sharing my experience.
 
I booted the LiveCD and then chose to install it to the USB drive during installation. And yes, I DID choose the correct boot loader.

This is frustrating.
 
Terrador said:
I booted the LiveCD and then chose to install it to the USB drive during installation. And yes, I DID choose the correct boot loader.

This is frustrating.
Click to expand...

You probably did not format it properly.

What did you format the USB drive as?

It was really easy to boot Linux on a Mac for me on a thumb drive.
 
Shot in the dark. May not work. It definitely seems to be nearly impossible to boot Windows 7 installer via USB.

Try plugging the drive in after you've arrived at the boot loader. This seems to have helped some folks booting from USB ODD, something about the drive that doesn't get "turned on" before the boot loader shows up already.

B
 
I dont know. What should it be formatted as? Furthermore, do you have a simple step-by-step?
 
balamw said:
Shot in the dark. May not work. It definitely seems to be nearly impossible to boot Windows 7 installer via USB.

Try plugging the drive in after you've arrived at the boot loader. This seems to have helped some folks booting from USB ODD, something about the drive that doesn't get "turned on" before the boot loader shows up already.

B
Click to expand...

I tried that already. No luck.
 
balamw said:
As I said, may not work ;)

Is the thumb drive partitioned GPT or MBR? What do you mean by the "correct boot loader".

B
Click to expand...

I meant that I made sure to put the boot loader on the flash drive.
 
Go to disk utility, click on the drive (not the volume)

What does it say under Partition Map Scheme?
 
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