I have a laptop running xp I'd like to boot with a ubuntu live cd. But the computer doesnt have a cd drive and I dont have an external one. I have a usb 500G external hard drive that I use with a different windows computer to store media files and the like. I'm downloading the ubuntu iso onto this drive now.
But how do I boot from that? I have booted the laptop with another OS that I have on a small thumb drive before, so I know how to do that (F12 and then choose the drive to boot from). But the thumb drive didnt have anything on it but the OS. How can I get the laptop to find and boot ubuntu from the 500G drive?

eta: maybe i should add the reason i am trying to do this is because i'd like to dual boot the laptop and want to use ubuntus partitioner to partition the drive. right now it is one big partition with xp on it. googling around it seems the ubuntu graphical partitioner is to best to use (more tutorials for it and easy for me to understand) without killing the version of xp i already have on there. however, if someone has another way to go about this, i'd be grateful to learn of it.

If you just have the iso file on the usb drive and expect it to boot from it then you will always be dismayed. You will need to make the drive bootable. You can use unetbootin and use it to make the usb drive bootable. If you already have windows xp then download the exe file from sourceforge and use it.

Two methods to install ubuntu without a CD drive.
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/install-ub...rom-drive.html

Convert your USB to liveUSB.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo

I get the idea that these methods will mess up my drive/327 gigs of other files. (I am not trying to install ubuntu, just use the gui partition tool it has.)

Why?

What are you going to partition your drive into?

You have said:... are we to understand that you do not want to dual boot with Ubuntu, but you want to prepare the drive to recieve another OS???

If you create a pendrive linux version of ubuntu - this will include ubuntus partitioning tool. If you already have a pendrive linux, you probably already have the tool (parted, qparted, gparted). Did you check?

Have you tried booting from the CD drive the same way you booted from the usb thumb drive?

It is also possible to use the smart boot manager, on a thumb-drive, to boot from the cd drive, starting ubuntu.


Before repartitioning, you should always back up. Data loss is rare these days but better safe than sorry: it would be unprofessional to advise otherwise. Technically you should be making backups anyway.

Apart from that, there is no special risk of data loss for any of these methods.