How to install Ubuntu 10.4 Live CD on a bootable USB Flash Drive

This project used: 

Acer Aspire Desktop Model AST180-ED380A S/N PTS560X012702031EA2702 
BIOS on Acer T180 with m/board EM61SM/EM61PM .. 
- Sys BIOS 6.0 PG 
- SMBIOS v. 2.3 
- BIOS ID R01-B1 12/29/2006.

Ubuntu 8.04 i385. 
Linux bertha 2.6.24-28-generic #1 SMP Thu May 27 00:16:49 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

Ubuntu Live CD for 10.4 (32-bit i386): ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso

SanDisk Cruzer Micro with U3 part # SDC26-4096RB

Step 1: Back up your USB drive if you need to save the contents.

Step 2: Download your bootable ISO file.

Step 3: Check your system's BIOS Settings

Check your system's BIOS Settings support boot from USB.

On my system (Acer T180 with R01-B1 BIOS version) I had to:

  1. add Removable at the start of the Boot Order list
  2. disable BIOS Boot Block Protect
  3. enable Boot Floppy Seek

Your bootable USB may show up in your Boot Menu under "Removable Media" or under "Hard Disks".

Step 3: partition and format your Flash drive

I used gparted to format the drive per this URL.

You want the device to show up like this:

To double check, fdisk should now show the partition table like this: 

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc

Disk /dev/sdc: 4110 MB, 4110227968 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 499 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000c0027

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1   *           1         382     3068383+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sdc2             383         499      939802+  83  Linux

You want the drive's two partitions to look like this when you issue the mount command: 

/dev/sdc1 on /media/disk type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,shortname=mixed,uid=1000,utf8,umask=077,flush)
/dev/sdc2 on /media/disk-1 type ext3 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal)

Step 4: Install unetbootln

Install unetbootln (it also needs package p7zip-full). See http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/. The file installs as /Some_FolderName/unetbootin-linux-471.

Step 5: run unetbootin

Run sudo ./unetbootin-linux-471. You must use sudo. Your two disks on the Flash drive must be mounted first and you are going to install to the first partition.

  1. select your distribution
  2. select your disk image
  3. select your target partition

Click OK when ready.

When the program is finished you should see:

Hit "Exit", then shut down your machine gracefully and then reboot off the USB Flash Drive.

[End - version 2010-06-19 00:18 CDT].