Made in Paté

There is a lot of info on the net on how to install ubuntu on a pendrive but when I had to do it I found that it was not that clear

So I decided to describe my easy method here to have a persistent ubuntu on a usb pendrive.

Maybe my method is not the best but It’s the easiest way I found to do it.

note : You will need at least a 4GB drive to do this.

Ok so first plug in your usb key and launch gparted.

If you don’t have gparted installed just do a simple

sudo apt-get install gparted

Now select your usb key from the drop down list at the top right of gparted.

Now you need to create two partitions

The first one has to be 750Mo in fat16 – it will be used to store the ubuntu live CD you can name it whatever you want

The second one depends on your usb key size ( the bigger it is the more data you can store in persistent mode) but has to called casper-rw and should be in ext2 format

Both of those partition are primary partitions.

Now let gparted do the magic.(save your data first !)

Ok so now download the iso of the ubuntu version you want to install to your usb key (http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download).

now that you have this start of usb-creator

you can either type usb-creator in your shell or System->administration->usb startup disk creator

In the first box add the iso you just downloaded

and in the second box select the partition you just created on your usb drive.

Ok so now here is the tricky part DO NOT select persistent mode but choose the opposite option.

Now click finish and let him work for a few minutes.

When it’s finished open the partition of your usb pendrive with the live cd and find the directory called isolinux and copy all of its content in the root of the partition.

It will warn you about overwritting syslinux.cfg you have to say yes.

Now to finish you have to open the file text.cfg in the root dir

and change

label live
  menu label ^Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer
  kernel /casper/vmlinuz
  append  locale=fr_FR bootkbd=fr file=/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.gz quiet splash --

to this ( we just add the keyword persistent after boot=casper )

label live
  menu label ^Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer
  kernel /casper/vmlinuz
  append  locale=fr_FR bootkbd=fr file=/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper persistent initrd=/casper/initrd.gz quiet splash --

Reboot and try to boot from the usb and select the try ubuntu without anychange… your changes should be stored in the casper-rw partition.

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