Booting Ubuntu from USB stick

by Sebastien Mirolo on Tue, 16 Nov 2010

Ubuntu 10.10 comes with support for Virtual Machines. As I started to port fortylines testing infrastructure to a new more quiet machine, it is a good time to start playing around with virtual machine provisionning and decomisionning.

After downloading ubuntu-10.10-server-amd64.iso from the Ubuntu official website, I stumbled upon the issue of booting it from a usb stick. I followed the instructions to create a bootable usb drive from the iso on an OSX host. That turned out to be a disaster. A long time in debugging and searching through the web revealed that if the dd command fails to copy a read-only ISO on top a read/write drive, you won't be able to change the content of that drive afterwards. After I bought a new usb stick and create the usb bootable drive from within an Ubuntu virtual machine, I had no problem to boot and install the new machine that will serve as the virtual machine provider server. There is a caution message about following the OSX instructions but in my opinion it should be a big "don't do it".

by Sebastien Mirolo on Tue, 16 Nov 2010