Once the OS has booted from a live USB, do you still need it to run the computer, or can you safely eject it?

If you are booting a system that is on your hard drive from the bootloader on the Live USB, you should be able to. You are not really clear on what you have or what you are booting?

i think some live-usb's have a toram boot option.

schneidz may be correct that a toram or other means to copy the OS to memory might allow you to remove the usb. The problem is that there are so many distro's and each way a live cd could be made makes it hard to guess an answer.

You can try it and see.

Some distro's call the boot option different than toram. Not all distro's have the ability to eject CD which is where this ability would come from.


A standard live usb that was a made from a normal install could not be ejected, only some live cd's using some live usb creator's could do it.

Yes. If you boot from Live USB you need to keep the USB inserted till you shut down your computer, else your computer will hang.