While the USB drive is connected, go into your BIOS and check you boot from settings.
 
If your system is not that old, you may be able to boot from the USB.
 
The trick at least for mine, is that the USB needs to be connected first.
 
I looked for info about booting from usb on my system, but couldn't find anything, even looking in the bios, as far as I could find out, it wasn't capable.
 
It wasn't until a year later, that I had a usb drive connected, and I was looking for something else in the bios, and I saw the option to boot from usb.
 
DOH !!!!!!!!!!!!
 
There was nothing in the docs about it, so I had stopped looking.
 
 


From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Mark Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 8:47 PM
To: plug
Subject: Ubuntu Live CD Question


We recently obtained a used Dell notebook for my wife.  The DVD drive was toast, so I bought an external/USB DVD drive to use. Wanting to test it on some Linux things, I tried booting from an Ubuntu 8.10 Live CD. After it failed to boot from the CD (no surprise), booting instead into Windows, the Ubuntu 8.10 Live CD was still in the drive. After a while, the CD did an autorun and offered to install as an application under windows--with two caveats: 1) hibernation was disabled, and 2) "disk performance will be slightly reduced."

Questions:

1) Has anyone out there done this?

2) How well does it work?

3) Is
disk performance under both Windows & Linux affected? How much?

4) When I'm through playing with it, does it uninstall cleanly?

Thanks for any help,

Mark Jarvis