In a previous article I walked you through how to make a Bootable Ubuntu CD to retrieve your information from a dead windows machine. Now I’m gonna show you how to make a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive. To do this we’ll use a small software program called UNetBootin, which doesn’t need to be installed, just download and open it. Download the Ubuntu installation cd if you haven’t already then in UNetBootin just point the diskimage to the Ubunto ISO and choose your flash drive and hit ok. The process doesn’t take very long to copy the files and install bootloader. Once this finishes you’ll be asked to reboot, which isn’t necessary unless you want to test booting from the flash drive.

You might get a device error when trying to boot from the flash drive because the partition is not marked as active. In that case you’ll need to use the command line diskpart utility to fix this, if using Windows Vista you can open the command prompt by right clicking and choosing Run as Administrator. Once you’ve got the command prompt open type “diskpart” to get to the diskpart utility. Then type “list disk” to list the drives on your computer then “select disk #” (where # use the number of the drive), “select partition 1″ and then “active”. The “active” command will mark the current partition as active. After this you should be good to go, you can try to boot from the flash drive. Every BIOS is different but most of them will tell you which key to press for the boot menu and boot from your flash drive. You’ll actaully see a UNetbootin menu instead of the regular Ubuntu boot menu, which has basically the same options. The boot process should be alot faster than using the regular Ubuntu boot cd.

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