How to create bootable USB pen drive

Bootable pen drive is a nice way to install operating systems to your machine. Only you need to do is just create bootable pen drive as describe here and change boot drive order to boot from USB, then you are ready to install any operating system from USB!

Here, I am going to describe How to create bootable USB pen drive to instal Ubuntu 13.04 64bit using one of nice software in Windows. This software supports large number of Linux operating system distributions and non-Linux operating systems such as Windows 7.

Note that you will need to have Operating System as an iso image file to make this happen.

Step 1
Download Universal USB Installer which enable you to create bootable pen drive.

Step 2
Plug your USB pen drive to your machine and start the downloaded exe file.

Step 3
Follow every steps as described,

• Select operating system to be installed (Here, Ubuntu 13.04 64bit).
• Select Pen Drive to extract selected operating system.

Step 4

You will get a window like this before you continue when you press on Create button on step3. Notice that I have selected the option Format to format my pen drive, you can uncheck this option anyway.

Press yes to continue.


Step 5
You will see several processes running from the software to perform the task. You will need to wait few minutes to complete these processes.

Step 6
Finally, you should see the success! then you can complete creating bootable pen drive and you can instal your operating system using pen drive.

Happy installing !

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Revert Ubuntu boot loader after installing Window 7

This post will describe to install Ubuntu GRUB boot loader after installing windows 7 on a PC that already Ubuntu installed. Also this is a problem that I faced after installing Windows 7. Suddenly my Windows 7 installation was crashed and I formatted Windows installed drive and reinstall the Windows 7. I was used Windows and Ubuntu installed on different drives as a dual boot. But after installing windows 7 Ubuntu boot loader was overwritten by windows boot loader and that boot loader does not list my Ubuntu installation. Therefore I could not select Ubuntu to load and windows boot loader automatically boot the Windows7 itself. To overcome this problem we have to overwrite GRUB boot loader on windows boot loader. Follow the steps that I explained bellow correctly to do that.

This method will copy boot settings from Ubuntu Live-CD in order to boot from GRUB boot loader.

Step1- Insert Ubuntu Live CD into CD drive and boot from it.

Step2- Click on 'Try Ubuntu' (on Ubuntu 11.04) to load Ubuntu from Live CD without affecting to your computer.










Step3- When Ubuntu Live desktop appear Run 'Terminal' (Application-->Accessories-->Terminal) to execute following commands.
Step4- In terminal type sudo fdisk -l
It will display all partitions on the hard disk with some details

Identify the partition which Ubuntu installed by checking 'System' column from the above result. The partition which has 'Linux' under system column is the partition of Ubuntu installed.

But here(in my computer) 3 partitions hold 'Linux' under system column. Therefore you should identify the correct partition. For that you can use 'Disk utility' software(it is already included in Live-CD session). Still complicated to identify the partition please be patient, it can be identify in next step.


Step5- Mount the Ubuntu partition drive
    sudo mount /dev/sdXX /mnt
    (Example- sudo mount /dev/sda9 /mnt)

Now go to Home directory(Place-->Home), go to root directory and go to mnt directory by double clicking. Make sure here the folders such as 'boot', 'opt', 'usr' and 'bin' etc exists on this directory(/mnt directory). If not you could not mount Ubuntu installed partition to the mnt, so unmount it and mount the correct partition to the mnt.(To unmount type sudo unmount /mnt)

Step6- If you have different partitions for boot, home, etc... mount them to each corresponding directory in /mnt directory.
Example- sudo mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/boot

                sudo mount /dev/sda10 /mnt/home

(to check whether you mount correct partition to the correct directory check out the content of each directories)

Step7- Now all the files that are required had mounted and ready to install GRUB boot loader.

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

(Note-That's /dev/sda the hard disk itself, not Ubuntu installed partition)
If it says grub-install is not a command then you had some mistake on mounting.

Step8- Unmount and restart
    unmount all the partitions that mounted.
    Restart the computer - sudo reboot


That's it. Now you can see the GRUB boot loader with all the installed operating system listed.

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