Method 1: Create Windows 10 Bootable USB on Ubuntu Linux (GUI Interface) Although Linux was originally developed for text environment, it is now a great desktop computing box with GUI interface. So the first part of this tutorial is to use a GUI program to make a bootable Windows 10 USB, which a lot of easier for Linux newbies. Boot into Ubuntu on a borrowed machine or from an internet cafe Use tools installed by default on the USB stick to repair or fix a broken configuration Creating a bootable Ubuntu USB stick from Microsoft Windows is very simple and we're going to cover the process in the next few steps. Creating a bootable USB drive is one of the most preferred ways of testing and installing a Linux operating system on a PC. This is so because most modern PCs don't come with a DVD drive anymore. Further, USB drives are easily portable and less delicate than a CD / DVD. Many graphical tools abound that can help you create a bootable USB drive. Select the appropriate version of the Ubuntu you downloaded in step 1 above. Browse to the.iso file downloaded by browsing to the folder and selecting the file. This is usually Downloads folder in Windows operating system. Select your USB drive letter (the size will appear at the end as seen in the screenshot above). Ubuntu 14.04 and later WoeUSB is a tool for creating a bootable USB flash drive used for installing Windows. Native UEFI booting is supported for Windows 7 and later images. WoeUSB is an updated fork of the WinUSB project.
I regularly have the need to try things out on Linux. Sometimes a virtual machine won't cut it for me typically due to memory, disk and performance limitations. Moreover, a decent, up-to-date, bootable Linux environment is a great backup in case all of my other computers are broken, infected or stolen. That entails having the Linux installation on an external, USB-attached hard disk drive which can boot with relative ease on any UEFI-enabled PC (driver compatibility notwithstanding). Moreover, all the preparatory work has to be performed using a single-boot Windows computer without ending up having a dual boot system. It sounds tough. It is tough, but I'm writing this from my portable Ubuntu Linux installation running off a USB-attached SSD!
What you need
- An empty external (USB) hard drive. I used a USB 3 drive enclosure with a cheap 256Gb SSD. For those of you worrying about performance, the USB 3.0 port is faster than the maximum transfer rate of any SSD I've seen to this date.
- Ubuntu Linux bootable USB drive. Very easy to create using Rufus on Windows. I used a cheap, promotional flash drive. Reduce, reuse, recycle FTW.
- Windows System Repair Disc (a bootable USB drive with Windows recovery tools which you can make yourself) or a Windows installation or rescue CD-ROM / DVD-ROM. I used another promotional flash drive.
Remember to take backups of all your critical files and folders before continuing. You are going to make changes to your computer. If it breaks don't cry, I warned you. Also test both your bootable media. Twice. You will need them both!
Caveats
Having a dual- or multi-boot system isn't as straightforward as it used to be a decade ago. Nowadays, in the interest of security, performance and backwards compatibility, there are many semi-hidden options and features which can get in your way. Given enough experience and patience you can work around them. Below is a selection of problems that got me moderately stumped along the way.
Secure boot caveat
I have only tested these instructions with Secure Boot turned off. Even though Ubuntu does support Secure Boot (it comes with signed bootloaders) I have no idea if my method uses the signed bootloaders or not. I suggest turning off Secure Boot if possible.
FastBoot caveats
Many boards come with some sort of 'fast boot' or 'boot optimization' options. For example, my Intel NUC has an option called Fast Boot which won't let me choose an alternative boot device at startup. It also has an option to support Intel Rapid Start Technology which does get in the way of booting to multiple OS. Navegador safari para windows. I had to disable both.
It's worth noting that Windows 8 and 10 have an Fast Startup or Fast Boot feature. This feature takes some shortcuts when it comes to booting and also makes the NTFS filesystem remain in a dirty state, making it unwriteable from Linux. It's best to understand what it does and disable it if you plan on writing to your Windows drive from Linux.
USB host controller caveat
Some firmwares will present the USB host controller as UHCI (USB 1.1) at boot time. When Linux probes for an xHCI (USB 3) host controller during the boot process they will respond positively. At this time Linux loads the xHCI driver and the USB host controller resets itself.
However, your root filesystem is inside a device attached to this USB controller. Therefore the controller resetting means that Linux can no longer communicate with the USB-attached hard drive. Therefore the Linux boot will hang forever without any further indication as to what went wrong.
Most affected boards (including my Intel NUC) have an option to enable the xHCI host controller interface by default. Enabling the xHCI option in the BIOS fixes the hanging boot issue. If you are only using modern operating systems with USB 3 support (anything newer than and including Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu Linux 15.04) you can safely enable that option.
Installing Linux
Boot your computer from the Ubuntu Linux bootable USB drive. Remember that you may have to enter your computer's boot manager to do that (on my Intel NUC I have to press F10; on most other BIOS I've seen it's F9; consult your BIOS documentation).
Install Ubuntu Linux regularly. When it prompts you about the disk layout choose Something Else and partition your external HDD the way you want. I chose to create a modestly sized root partition (about 40Gb), a swap partition that's as big as the biggest RAM configuration I am going to be using this installation with plus one Gb (my computers max out at 16Gb so I made a 17Gb swap partition) and the rest of the disk went to a massive /home partition.
Caveat: I chose to use btrfs which – as I learned along the way – makes things a bit more complicated down the line. For your sanity's sake I recommend using ext4. This guide assumes the use of btrfs and will point out the caveats with this approach.
Fix Windows 10 boot
Unfortunately the Ubuntu Installer assumes that you want a dual booting configuration alongside Windows. Therefore it adds itself (actually, the bootloader it uses, GRUB2) to your computer's UEFI configuration. This causes two problems. For starters, the external HDD is not portable as you cannot boot with it on another computer.
Secondly, if you remove this external HDD your Windows won't boot. Bummer. We have to fix that.
- Shut down your computer.
- Disconnect the Ubuntu HDD
- Boot from the Windows system repair disc USB drive (or a Windows installation or rescue CD-ROM / DVD-ROM).
- Select Repair your computer.
- Select the operating system and click Next.
- Choose Command Prompt.
- In the command prompt run
- Verify that the EFI partition is using the FAT32 file system. It will have a volume ID, let's say 99. Now we need to assign a drive letter to it. Back in the command prompt type:
- Now we need to fix the boot record. Again in the command prompt type:
- Finally, we need to re-create the BCD store which tells the Microsoft boot loader where to find Windows so it can boot it. From our trusted command prompt:
- If this didn't work try
At this point exit the command prompt and shut down your computer.
Create an ESP on the Ubuntu HDD
A hard drive is not bootable with UEFI unless it has an ESP (EFI System Partition). An ESP is simply a FAT32 partition with a special flag that tells the EFI BIOS to look inside it for boot information. We have to create one on your hard drive.
- Plug in your external HDD and the Ubuntu Linux bootable USB stick.
- Boot with the Ubuntu Linux bootable USB stick using the option to try Ubuntu before installing.
- Open a Terminal (CTRL-ALT-T)
- Run
sudo fdisk -lto get a list of partitions. - Identify from them the drive that has the Linux partitions, in my case /dev/sdb. I'll call it /dev/sdX from now on.
- Also identify the partition that contains the root filesystem. I will call it /dev/sdXY from now on.
- Launch GParted from the Terminal: Why not just click on GParted on your desktop? Well, I kept receiving errors about the Ubuntu Linux bootable USB stick because it was already in use. Of course it is, I am using it to run the computer off it, duh!
- Resize the first partition on disk to have another 200 Mb of free space after it.
- Create a new partition on the free space, changing the file system to fat32.
- Apply operations. You need to do that now for the next step to be possible.
- Right click the new partition.
- Click on Manage Flags.
- Set the boot and esp flags. This is what makes the partition 'special' to the EFI BIOS.
- One more thing! Note down the the partition that contains the ESP filesystem. I will call it /dev/sdXZ from now on.
Make sure the Ubuntu installation on the external HDD can see the ESP
The new ESP on the external drive must be visible by the Ubuntu installation in the HDD. Otherwise GRUB2, the Linux bootloader, won't be able to update itself, making your system unbootable after the next kernel update at the latest.
- Launch GParted from the Terminal, as we saw above:
- Double click the partition with your Linux root (/) filesystem on the external HDD
- Note down the UUID, e.g. 01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-4567890abcde
- Double click the new FAT32 partition and note down the UUID, e.g. 0123-ABCD
- Close GParted
- Open a Terminal
Windows10 Create A Ubuntu Bootable Usb Drive
The process is different depending on the format of your root partition on the external hard disk.
If you DID NOT use btrfs (e.g. you used ext4)
If you DID use btrfs
If you DID use btrfs, you made your life complicated. We need to mount the btrfs subvolume containing the root partition instead of the entire partition. Otherwise you'll never be able to install GRUB and you'll probably lose an entire day, like me.
This will give you a line with a numeric ID. Let's say 123. Note it down.
The rest of the instructions are common, no matter if used btrfs, ext4 or something else
Create A Bootable Usb Drive Windows 10
- There is a line with /boot/efi already in this file. Comment it by placing a # in front of it.
- Add the following line:
Install GRUB2 on the external drive's EFI System Partition
Right now our external drive has an empty ESP. We need to put a bootloader in it to make it actually, well, bootable.
First caveat: all the instructions you find on-line assume you are using a dual boot system with Windows or macOS. When you have an external drive it is critical that you use the --removable option in the last step. This installs the EFI bootloader under the special 'fallback path' EFIBootbootx64.efi in the ESP. Normally this not supposed to be used for permanently installed Operating Systems. It's the mechanism used by EFI BIOS to boot arbitrary external media. Technically, that's exactly what our external hard drive is: arbitrary external media!
Second caveat: installing the bootloader is only possible from inside the Linux installation we want to boot. However, we need the bootloader to boot that installation, leading to a Catch-22 issue. The solution is to run the bootloader installation through a chroot jail. The actual caveat that got me stumped for a day comes from the fact that I am using btrfs (because it's so much better for SSDs!). btrfs has subvolumes. If you mount the entire partition instead of a subvolume the grub-install script can't figure out the mapping between paths and devices, therefore failing to install itself on the ESP, returning the cryptic error
The error is misleading! /dev is mounted if you follow my instructions below. Premiere pro questions. The actual problem, as I understand it, is that there is a discrepancy between the mounted device and the path to the chroot root. That's why I had you mount only the subvolume containing the root filesystem in the steps above. If you were not paying attention, you are not following the instructions step-by-step, you rebooted before this step or just came here directly looking for a solution to your problem about GRUB not installing look above for instructions on mounting the correct btrfs subvolume.
- We need to prepare the chroot environment. The ESP must be mounted in the correct place and we have to bind system mount point for some special trees (most notably /dev). Moreover, we will copy the resolv.conf file to let the chroot environment have network access should it need it.
- Finally we enter the chroot environment and install Grub in a way suitable for a removable device (see the first caveat above).
Now your external HDD is bootable. Reboot your computer, select it from the boot media selection of your UEFI BIOS and you're done!
Flash drives are used as bootable devices for installing operating systems quite often. But it would be very good to have more than one operating system on a flash drive. Let's say several different Linux distributions, or even a multiboot USB pen drive with Windows and Linux. It's possible.
In today's article, we'll look at how to create a dual bootable USB stick with Ubuntu Linux 17.04 and Windows 10 operation systems. With WinUSB you don't need to look Ubuntu ISOs in Internet, because WinUSB can download Ubuntu Server, Desktop and Kylin ISOs automatically, but of course you may download last version of distribution from Ubuntu official web-site yourself and burn it to your flash drive using WinUSB. If you don't have a Windows ISO or DVD, read here how to download Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft website.
Ok, when you are ready, you need to download and run WinUSB.
First you need to select the USB drive that you want to make bootable for Ubuntu and Windows.
When it will be plugged, WinUSB will detect it automatically and show in combo-box. The upper horizontal line below of USB stick name represents the ratio of free and used space. The second line represents a space on drive required to make it bootable with selected Windows and Ubuntu distributions.
To select Windows distribution you need find it in standard dialog that will be opened by click one of the round buttons – ISO or DVD, depending on the type of distribution that you have, you can see buttons on screenshot above. After selection, it will be displayed in the application as shown in the screenshot below. Note, that you can set the name of boot menu point for this distribution on the small dialog shown below.
To select Ubuntu ISO the first you need to click 'Other Boot loaders' button than choose Ubuntu redaction that you want add your multiboot USB drive like it shown on screenshot below. If you want WinUSB to download Ubuntu distribution automatically then place mouse pointer on necessary redaction than click on button with processor architecture – 32 or 64 bit. For examlple look on second screenshot below, where cursor placed on Desktop redaction. Note, that WinUSB will automatically download Ubuntu version 17.04.
If you have your own Ubuntu distribution, then, of cource, you can use it by click 'Ubuntu ISO file' icon, chose ISO in file open dialog, and WinUSB will create bootable USB stick with it.
Ok, when Ubuntu ISO that you want to burn on USB are selected, you'll see something like screenshot below. Just click 'Next' button to select USB drive format mode.
WinUSB propose some option to create a bootable USB drive. If there is enough USB stick free space, WinUSB will prompt you to make it bootable without formatting as shown bellow in the screenshot on the left.
If the space is not enough, WinUSB will offers you either to perform pre-formatting, or cancel it by pressing the 'Back' button, free up enough space on the flash drive, and then come back to work option screen. Application will automatically detect the release of the space and will propose to continue without formatting. Note, don't ask WinUSB format to fat32 USB drive bigger than 32Gb!
