How to Actually Install Ubuntu on USB – Guide
A live USB is used to test the distribution. It is also used to install Linux on your computer’s hard drive. Normally, all changes made to your live distribution are lost and this limits the use of live USB. Several It’s FOSS readers requested a tutorial about installing Linux on a USB. Not regular live USB with persistence, but real Ubuntu installed on a USB disk. That means having a portable Ubuntu Linux on a USB that you can plug into any computer, use it, save your work on USB as if it were a real hard drive. The procedure doesn’t look much different from installing Ubuntu on the real hard drive. And this is where people make mistakes. the available tutorials on the internet miss the most crucial part: the bootloader.
Problem with bootloader on UEFI systems
The biggest problem with this configuration is installing the bootloader on UEFI systems. A system can only have one ESP partition active at a time and this causes problems. When installing Linux, even if you choose USB as the bootloader destination, the existing ESP partition is still used to place the EFI file for the new distribution. This means that Linux installed on the external USB will be the last to update and control the bootloader. This can create several problems such as: This frustrates the whole idea of having a portable Linux USB, right? Do not worry. I will share a cool trick to install Ubuntu or other Linux distributions on a USB without messing up up with the host system bootloader and the system on USB. Before starting to follow the tutorial, read it in its entirety and then do it on your system.
Things You Should Know Before Installing Linux on a USB
The workaround or workaround for the boot loader problem is not to let the installer know that an ESP partition already exists. If you have a desktop PC, you can remove the hard drive and that might solve the problem, but things will be difficult when it’s a laptop. Removing the disk is out of the question here. An easier way is to remove the ESP flag from the ESP partition before installing Linux on USB and put it back after installation. This way you trick the Ubuntu installer into thinking there is no existing ESP partition and it will create and use a new ESP partition on the USB. The original ESP partition on the hard drive has not changed. Clever trick, I know. Let me ask you some more questions and add some suggestions: Regarding the slower experience with Linux on USB, if your system has a thunderbolt port, I advise getting a thunderbolt SSD. I have a SanDisk SSD and when I used Linux installed on it, the experience was very smooth, almost like the SSD on the system.
Final note
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