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I installed Ubuntu 18.04 (NOT THE INSTALLATION MEDIA) on a USB flash drive and it boots fine on the laptop that I made it on, but it won’t boot on any other computers.

I’m guessing maybe GRUB was installed on the laptop and not to the drive but I’m not sure.

I have semi-important stuff on it so trying to see first if there is any alternative to just erasing and retrying. I did the steps according to a tutorial and it boots fine on the computer it was made on.

If this is important or not, there is an option on my boot options that appeared after I downloaded Ubuntu on the flash drive that is still there whether the USB is plugged in or not. It's called ubuntu. It won't boot if the flash drive isn't plugged in but it's there.

Zanna
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Derek Feitosa
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1 Answers1

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It looks like you didn't change the grub installation location when you created the USB flash drive. This means that grub was installed on the /dev/sda drive and that's why you see that option on the boot menu.

If you want a standalone USB flash drive installation, you need to tell the installer to install grub on the USB flash drive too. You can do this by selecting /dev/sdX as grub installation location in the Something else partitioning option.

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In the Something else option, you can see the Device for boot loader installation. That's where you have to select the USB flash drive as the target device.

X should be the letter that corresponds to the USB flash drive.

Stormlord
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