USB stick will not boot Ubuntu 11.04
 

I am feeling that I am banging my head against a brick wall and am fearful of enjoying it.

I wish to work with Ubuntu 11.04 but rather than see how it looks from a Live CD my thought was to have the OS on a USB stick. By using the USB my idea was that any changes I wished to make would be saved and could be altered without having to start from scratch when using a Live CD.

I therefore followed the instruction on the Ubuntu download page but have not been able to load 11.04 from the stick.

At the moment I have 2 laptops dual booted. One has windows XP & Lucid the other windows 7 and Lucid. Attempting to load 11.04 on the stick only results in the usual Grub options but there appears to be no option that would permit booting into 11.04.

I have my Boot Sequence set as : Removable, CD/DVD, Hard Drive & finally Network so I really expected that the USB would have been read and actioned.

How can I boot 11.04 from the stick? Where am I going wrong ?

Your assistance will be most appreciated

Hello,

Can you post the exact link to the guide you followed? Most likely, your device is not being recognized as bootable, and I would like to see how exactly you set it up, maybe you forgot a step and/or forgot to do something that you didn't realize.

Cheers,

Josh

I find that you have to have a cold boot to bios with usb attached. Then see how the usb is being seen by bios. In most of my systems it ends up being a hard drive. I then have to move the usb above installed to get it to boot. Don't use removable, use hard drive first with order changed.

When you reboot it without usb it seems to go back to internal and when you again do cold boot with usb the order goes back to usb above internal.

I used the "Burn your CD or create a USB drive" from Burn your CD or create a USB drive. I selected the options for a USB stick and advised that I was doing it from Ubuntu.

I followed the example provided in the show me how having it open in a separate tab. Am confident that I followed things correctly.

I hope this assists

jefro

Just noticed your reply as I posted mine in response to corp769. I assume that when you say COLD that you mean that the system must be fully shut down and started with the pen drive attached. I will give this a go but from memory I think that I tried that and failed.

I will double check the boot sequence to ensure that Boot from removable is first in the sequence.

Will give it a few minutes and report back

Have totally shut down the system and confirmed on restart that the boot sequence was as advised in my original post.

Jefro when you say "Then see how the usb is being seen by bios" how do I do this ? I know how to set the sequence but how do I see it in operation?

If you can clarify this I will follow this through and see what happens.

Many thanks

I have the same issue - my head hurts also.
I followed the instructions for Ubuntu 11.04 on a USB key.
My BIOS sees the key as Removable device, and I have the same boot sequence as you described.
When I boot the system, it boots Vista from the hard drive.

In Windows, explorer sees multiple folders on the USB key, including BOOT, and multiple files including ldlinux.sys.

I'm a complete noob so I hope someone can help.

exscouse

I don't know what has happened with my attempts. I have been doing some more googling and it appears that I should also have a persistant partition organised.

A link was provided to http://www.pendrivelinux.com where using the Universal USB Installer seemed to set things up OK. It still did not work as expected for me however it might for you.

I am going back to my computer manufacturer to check whether a USB pendrive formatted via this method should work and if so may challenge the pendrive manufacturer.

I hope it might work for you, best of luck