Your computer might even tell you which key to press. Which key to press depends on the brand of your computer. When the splash screen of your computer’s manufacturer appears, you need to press either F1, F2, F12, ESC or DEL on your keyboard to enter the BIOS menu of your computer. Now it is time to plug in the flashed USB drive and restart your computer.

Patience and also backup your data elsewhere.

An empty external hard drive (HDD, SATA SSD, M.2 NVMe SSD etc.).

A brief tutorial is available- Create a bootable USB stick on Windows Ubuntu.

A bootable USB pen drive with Ubuntu 20.04 installation media(or any other version).You can create this from your Windows computer by Rufus.

These are the steps I went through for creating a truly portable drive- Requirements Most of what follows is roughly aligned with Anthony’s post. I went across a various articles and I found Anthony Bouch’s post here- How to Create a Truly Portable Ubuntu Installation on an External Drive which was brilliant and pretty much helped in achieving the goal. Type command ls to see available devices.But the problem that arises is whether this qualifies as a plug-n-play drive, for which the answer is definitely a NO, you simply cannot boot your external drive into another laptop with no GRUB bootloader installed. You should see the grub> prompt.įirst, check if GRUB detects your USB drive. When the GRUB screen appear, press C or ESC to go to the GRUB console. If you have your bootable USB drive, insert it into the computer. If not, you can use a tool called Unetbootin to create a bootable USB drive.

I assume that you already have a bootable USB drive with your favorite Linux distro. I had an opportunity to learn how to boot from USB using GRUB. Moreover, ever since I installed GRUB, the shortcut to summon booting device selection stopped working. I prepared a USB stick with the new system, but I couldn’t boot from it – BIOS was restoring the booting order on every reboot. I use it from time to time, but one day the filesystem crashed, and even fsck couldn’t repair it. One of my old computers runs Linux with GRUB as a bootloader.

But what if both options failed for some reason?

If not, there is an option in BIOS/UEFI to change that. Almost every modern computer has a dedicated menu to choose from which device the system should boot.

Ventoy grub command line