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How-To: Install Ubuntu Linux With No Optical Drive

pcmech.com — Sick of burning CDs of Linux distributions every time you want to try out a new one? Don’t worry, you can reuse your USB stick as many times as you like and burn bootable ISOs to it. Is there an easy way to do this? Yes.

Who dugg this? Made popular Sep 2, 2008

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  • Phocion55, on 09/02/2008, -0/+12Where did anyone ever say it was exclusive to Ubuntu in the first place? I'd suggest submitting the article if you think it would be useful for people.

    In the meantime, buried for bitching for the sake of bitching.
  • bmorency, on 09/02/2008, -0/+10What happens when a user doesn't have windows installed? you can't use wubi if you only have linux installed.
  • jamesatdigg, on 09/02/2008, -0/+10one more option to install ubuntu/kubuntu/xubuntu without optical drive http://www.ubuntugeek.com/install-ubuntukubuntuedu ...
  • obliviousfool, on 09/03/2008, -0/+8I generally like to do things less than a million times, so the statement is true for me.
  • inactive, on 09/02/2008, -1/+8How the hell is that hard? You download the program, select which distro to install on the USB stick, and restart, booting from the stick. How is that hard? Are you retarded?
  • Cupantae, on 09/02/2008, -2/+9Yes. Wubi.
  • ferrariman60, on 09/02/2008, -1/+8Or not, because that would require an optical drive. See how you missed the point?
  • TheLoneHoot, on 09/02/2008, -1/+7"So waste a $10 USB drive instead of a $1 CD."

    Because everybody knows that USB drives scratch so easily.
  • inactive, on 09/02/2008, -1/+7Yes! Because you can only use a USB drive once and then you have to throw it away, and only high quality people use them because $10 is better than $1 you poor person
  • t1andonlywall, on 09/02/2008, -2/+8"Don ’t worry, you can reuse your USB stick as many times as you like"

    False, flash memory has a fixed rewrite count usually around 1 million or so.
  • santasing, on 09/02/2008, -0/+6Good guide. I was facing the same issue on my laptop (dead DVD drive), but I followed this one here:

    http://www.teamteabag.com/2008/05/17/howto-easy-in ...

    Official Ubuntu guide: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/Fro ...
  • bradleyland, on 09/03/2008, -0/+5Step 1 - Install Windows

    ... wait, that can't be right.
  • inactive, on 09/03/2008, -0/+5Burning to a CD has a fixed rewrite count of zero.
  • ausdigger, on 09/15/2009, -0/+4yes you can with any BIOS from 2000 onwards (approx)
  • JakeW, on 09/03/2008, -0/+4and also.. What about Linux Mint...or other Linux Distros? = )
  • ommadawn, on 09/03/2008, -0/+3"The computer you do this on must be able to boot from USB."
    Most computers without optical drives are a little old. Unless your optical drive is broken and you have a new PC, this will be useful in very few situations.
  • kahrn, on 09/02/2008, -0/+3An alternative is available to both USB and CD booting if your system supports neither. It's called PXE booting (netbooting/network booting). Shameless plug as an example: http://kahrn.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/flashing-a-b ... (That's actually how to flash a BIOS, but it's a similar process nonetheless)
  • inactive, on 09/02/2008, -2/+5Don't do it. It's against the stupid MS EULA, and the silly bastards will prosecute you if they ever find out.
  • HPCELarry, on 09/02/2008, -1/+4This was written a year and a half ago. I think that there are easier ways now.
  • seanovan, on 09/02/2008, -1/+3http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=2 ...

    http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DA410C7F7E0 ...
  • neko, on 09/02/2008, -0/+2Was going to suggest PXELINUX but you beat me to it. It's pretty much a last resort if you have (for instance) a laptop with nothing else you can boot from, but it's saved me in the past (this was before Wubi was invented).
  • Disease, on 09/02/2008, -0/+2I like not having to burn another CD every time an update comes out.

    I'd much rather just update one of my many flash drives with the new ISO.
  • inactive, on 09/03/2008, -0/+2Um, no, you don't need to use the command line for this, you ***** idiot. In the worst case scenario you need to enter the BIOS to allow booting from USB, but that is hardware-specific and has nothing to do with Linux (and even in the BIOS you don't use the command-line, so suck it).
  • smotpoker, on 09/02/2008, -2/+4I miss the good ol' days when you could just install from the Windows partition. I bet you probably still can from slackware actually....

    Really though, isn't there a win32 grub installer or something that you can configure to search for initrd/vmlinuz in c: and launch an install env where you can easily select the path to the package sets you want installed (or maybe even just use c:ubuntu-version-install.iso to install from and/or boot initrd)?
  • Disease, on 09/02/2008, -0/+2If you're willing to wait 6 weeks for it to get to your house.

    Although I can't complain since they're giving it away for free.
  • Disease, on 09/03/2008, -0/+2Thank you bubba.
  • bradleyland, on 09/03/2008, -2/+4You fear someone is going to sue you as a result of your own ignorance?
  • inactive, on 09/03/2008, -0/+2I have found UNetbootin to be the best, works with multiple distros, its great , and no i didn't RTFA so it might be what its about
    http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html
  • motang, on 09/02/2008, -0/+2I used this program last week to make myself a USB thumb drive to install Kubuntu on my Eee Box.
  • bubba9999, on 09/02/2008, -0/+2Version updates need installation. Think XP to Vista.

    Minor updates, bug fixes, security patches are handled similarly to the way Winders does it.
  • retr0grade, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1whee bios upgrade- thank goodness that's still even an option :-D
  • seanovan, on 09/02/2008, -1/+2Forgive me, for I am a lowly Windows user and this is a little off-topic I know.

    I format laptops and desktops for friends and family and would like to put Hirens Boot CD, along with XP and Vista installers on a USB stick, any suggestions?
  • mickstephenson, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1Since we are promoting alternatives, I'm gonna shamelessly promote my own howto for doing this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=740924
  • JakeW, on 09/05/2008, -0/+1There is a huge amount of support for Linux in general, not just Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu as my main Linux distro.. but that doesn't mean others might not want to try others out. If you only have 1 Linux distro.. you're basically ignoring all other ideas.. and you've become Windows, and what Mac is becoming.
  • lapubell, on 09/04/2008, -0/+1it's not. I've done both. they are almost identical.

    although my favorite install was recently done with the sidux graphical installer. super fast. about 6 minutes.
  • mrsteveman1, on 09/03/2008, -0/+1There are cases where simply putting the ISO files on a usb stick doesn't work.

    One case I'm quite familiar with, opensuse. If you unpack their livecd ISO to a stick, setup all the correct syslinux stuff, the config file, put everything where it should be, it boots the kernel, loads the initrd, and promptly fails to do anything else because of the way their scripts are built.

    The opensuse wiki has instructions for replacing the initrd (which you shouldn't have to do, ubuntu doesn't need this step), but it has yet to work for me. I do remember something about sticking the entire ISO file on the stick but that isn't on their wiki.

    Another case of something you cant just stick on a CD, the ubuntu server and alternate CDs seem to be lacking the vfat module, so you can stick all the files on a usb stick, get it to boot, and then it won't be able to mount the stick directly to get to the packages it needs to install the system from.
  • lapubell, on 09/04/2008, -0/+1this is what i did to install when my laptop showed up at my house with a bogus optical drive.

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/Fro ...

    use the manual version.
  • smotpoker, on 09/03/2008, -0/+1@bubba & Disease

    There is also the apt-get dist-upgrade option. It may break some systems depending on your hardware and if you are using some sort of special drivers. I would think there is a similar option for yum and yast as well (though I'm not sure on those).

    Personally I only bother with new images if the dist-upgrade fails
  • vincentweber, on 09/02/2008, -1/+2Ehm... There are a lot of people who already have USB sticks laying around and there are also a lot of people who burn more than 10 distro's or versions of distro's.

    I can't reaach the website but the way I always do it is as simple as clicking next-next-next-finnish-wait a while-done.

    No commandline stuff had to be done... ever.
  • Vadi0, on 09/03/2008, -0/+1Too bad?

    One great advantage of Ubuntu, even over it's "lets take ubuntu and preinstall some stuff" distros, is the huge amount of support :)
  • newwatch51, on 09/04/2008, -0/+1Yeah, but I doubt that was legal.
  • freezerburn666, on 09/03/2008, -0/+1i first got feisty fawn on my laptop by booting off the network and having the iso on my desktop...
  • bootup, on 09/03/2008, -1/+2Digg needs to a way to kill this post. I'm all for good GNU/Linux information being on digg every day. This however wasn't very interesting. They didn't provide a way to do this from GNU/Linux. So what good is it experienced users who might actually use this tidbit? The crowd it plays to are those techs running MS Windows. That crowd tends to put GNU/Linux down anyway and likely won't have a real use for it since they aren't recommending GNU/Linux (heck-they don't even run it themselves- so fear supporting it).
  • smotpoker, on 09/03/2008, -0/+1Yes, Wubi does install from Windows but, AFAIK, it only works with/for Ubuntu... I was thinking of a more portable method that would work with any Linux distribution
  • newwatch51, on 09/04/2008, -0/+1orly? I've been doing this for a long time.
  • newwatch51, on 09/04/2008, -0/+1Actually, I think that only works in Windows 98 since that used FAT. WinXP uses NTFS, which I don't think GRUB supports.
  • detente85, on 09/03/2008, -0/+1I would actually find this very useful. I like to experiment with various distributions and occasionally check back to see updates and improvements. The only thing that was holding me back from really going nuts with it was the idea of having to go through so many CD's only to throw them out six (or so) months later in favor of new releases. These days, it's not uncommon to have a decent-sized flash drive that is going unused.
  • detente85, on 09/03/2008, -1/+2"But it should be noted that Ubuntu ... is the only one that has a NetInstall feature. This is the reason I chose it to begin with."

    For the record, openSUSE and Debian also have the net install ability. I hadn't tried net install with Ubuntu, but I assume this is the alternate text-installer version on the Ubuntu download page. I can't speak for Ubuntu, but I can't imagine it being made any easier than it is with Debian.
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