The other day I had the urge to do something technical, and drive away from the Forex trading that I have been doing.  So I thought about on how cool it would be to install a version of Linux on a USB drive.  I know it has been done before, but I didn’t know how, so that’s what I wanted to learn on doing.  The reason that came into mind is that I was tired of burning CDs after CDs every time a new Linux distro came out.  For some reason I don’t like using CD-RWs (that’s my flaw), so I figured since we can install it on a USB, why not do that instead of using CDs.

One distro that I wanted to test out was Wifiway, which is a distro aim at testing wireless security.  I knew that after I test it out I most likely not going to use the program again, thus i was trying to avoid burning a CD.  There were different post explaining pretty much the same thing.  I followed the instructions, reread the instructions several times and re-did the steps again.  While the Linux did seem that it was loading, it always got stuck saying :

Fatal error occurred – Can’t find executable chroot command
* Something went wrong and we can’t continue. This should never happen.
* Please reboot your computer with Ctrl+Alt+Del

So like everyone else I searched Google and no fix (or I didn’t look hard enough, probably cuz I was lazy).  What I did find in of the blog post was this nifty little program, and the whole reason for this post.  The program is called UNetbootin, an open source and thus free program.  The program it’s pretty simple to use.  It supports lots of different distros right out of the box, but you can use your own distro if they are not listed.  The "already included" distros are just meer links to the distro itself, which in turns downloads them to your computer and then extracts the files to the USB.  The other option is supplying your own ISO (or if you already have an ISO already listed, it can work too).


There’s a little catch to this:  the program does not do a full installation, but rather extracts the files from the ISO and make the USB bootable, as if you were burning a regual CD-R.  This means that unless the distro that you are running can be run as a LIVE CD, the Linux that would boot up would be the installation portion.  The good news is that if you have a big enough size USB (I was using a 1GB USB) you can run the installation and install the Linux in your USB (I have not tried it myself).

Since I already had an ISO downloaded, I just used the "Diskimage" option and installation took no more than 5 minutes.  After the program finishes, it asks you to reboot.  you have to make sure your computer BIOS accepts booting from a USB devices.  Once you have setup the BIOS, you are set to load a bootable version of Linux (if it’s a live CD) or run an installation from a USB instead of a CD.

If you have an ISO of a Windows OS, it will extract the files into the USB so you can install Windows from the USB.  If you would like to run Windows OS then follow this tutorial or this one.  I haven’t tried it myself, not interested in Windows in that matter.  But how cool would it be to run a web server from USB? It would mean it would produce less heat than a hard drive, runs much cooler, quieter, and faster.

Next step: multi-boot Linux from a USB (I would need a bigger USB Flash drive).  ENJOY!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 at 14:20 pm and is filed under Coding, Featured Articles, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.