In the previous post, I described how to create such an installation from VirtualBox. On the contrary, installing Linux on a USB drive will give you the full experience (and if the USB drive is fast it’s almost like using Linux on a standard computer that’s surely the case for an external SSD, which are quite cheap nowadays). I don’t want a live distribution: a live distribution only allows you a small testing experience, it’s not easily maintainable and upgradable, it’s harder to keep your data in there. I want to install Linux on a portable external USB SSD. The scenarioįirst of all, let’s summarize what I want to do. Just like suggested in, before you start experimenting with the procedure of this tutorial, read it entirely.

In this post, I’d like to summarize my experience applying the suggested workaround and also report that you might still get into trouble in some circumstances, but fixing things will be easy. Unfortunately, when I tried to boot such a Linux USB in my new LG GRAM 16, I realized that this LG GRAM provides no way to specify Legacy boot! Then, I found this interesting post from “It’s FOSS” that both explains the problem with UEFI I had previously experienced (that is, the fact I couldn’t boot my computer at all because the GRUB configuration was broken) and a way to circumvent the problem. Even in that case, it wasn’t a problem for me: it was enough to enable Legacy Boot in the computer’s BIOS. However, the USB with Linux installed through VirtualBox could be used only when booting from a computer with “Legacy boot” enabled, that is, it could not be booted if UEFI was the only choice in that computer. At that time, I did not investigate further, because the VirtualBox solution was working like a charm for me.

I was relying on VirtualBox because when I had tried to install Linux directly to an external USB drive after booting with another USB with a live image I ended up breaking my current computer’s grub configuration: if I tried to boot my computer without the newly created USB installation I couldn’t select any OS to boot. In that old blog post, I was using VirtualBox to do the actual installation. I have already blogged about installing Linux on an external USB stick or drive (better if it’s an SSD) to make such an installation portable on any computer.

Install linux usb