Make a USB Boot CD for Ubuntu 9.04

22Jul/090

The following tutorial explains how to create a USB Boot CD that can be used to boot a Ubuntu 9.04 USB flash drive on computers with a BIOS that does not natively support booting from USB. The boot CD contains a grub bootloader that loads the initrd and vmlinuz kernel from the CD and then proceeds to locate the filesystem on the USB drive. Because the USB driver modules are preloaded from the initrd on the CD, the compressed filesystem can then be detected and loaded from the USB device.

USB Boot CD for Ubuntu 9.04 creation essentials

PC with a BIOS that does not support booting from USB
Working CD Drive and USB Port
Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD
USB flash drive with Ubuntu 9.04 preinstalled

Insert the Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD and restart your computer, booting from the CD
Open a Terminal and Type mkdir -p ubcd/boot/grub
Type cp /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/stage2_eltorito ubcd/boot/grub
Type gedit ubcd/boot/grub/menu.lst
Add the following information to your menu.lst file and click save:

title Run Ubuntu 9.04 from USB DISK
root (cd)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true persistent
initrd /boot/initrd.gz
boot
Type cp /cdrom/casper/initrd.gz ~/ubcd/boot
Type cp /cdrom/casper/vmlinuz ~/ubcd/boot
Type sudo gedit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
Add the following lines to the modules file and click save:
```
 usbcore
 usb-storage
 uhci_hcd
 ohci_hcd
 ehci_hcd
 sd_mod
 scsi_mod
```
Type sudo gedit /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf
Add the following line to the bottom of the file and click save:

WAIT=8
Type sudo mkinitramfs -o ubcd/boot/initrd.gz 2.6.2*