BOOTING UBUNTU 16.04 FROM 32GB USB PERSISTENT

 

Bought a 32 GB USB drive….that is a complete hard drive! In stead of dual booting Linux from the hard drive, you can boot from the USB in persistent mode, and saving your work and settings. In reading/writing or booting speed is not really different from dual booting. This Philips USB 3.0 Circle 32 GB (compatible with USB 2.0) reads at 55MB/s and writes 10Mb/s. In order to speed up you can run the whole thing in RAM.

UEFI

Booting from USB is with UEFI a bit more difficult. Generally Ubuntu live start from UEFI with secure boot on. However installing a module in the kernel that is not signed (for example bcmwl-kernel-source, for wireless) is blocked. Let’s disable secure boot. Perfect working, however if you want to start a persistent live Ubuntu then you need to start from UEFI with CSM, because the Ubuntu .iso is a hybrid, and Compatibility Support Module (CSM) provides legacy BIOS compatibility. 

So start up the system with: disable secure boot and fast boot, and enable UEFI with CSM.

 

MKUSB

To make the USB booting persistent use mkusb. Choose the image, select the drive, tag UEFI and persistent. However when working on HP, mine is HP Elite 820, choose MSDOS partition table not the GUID partition table (GPT), which is standard for UEFI, because HP likes MSDOS better, it seems.

Now I am not only booting into Ubuntu from a portable hard drive, which I can carry along and use it on any machine.