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My desire is to do the following.

The computer has W8.1 on the HDD and it is using UEFI I want to install Ubuntu 15.04 on 32GB USB stick in a way that I can install regular updates and it remembers my settings and programs. When I remove the USB - I want the windows boot to start windows automatically (to avoid GRUB on the HDD at all)

I tried to install from live USB to /dev/usbdrive. However - even I pointed that the boot loader should be on /dev/usbdrive it still utilized the hard drive (and in such way mingled with the windows boot loader).

I checked the following guide How to create UEFI-only bootable USB live media? It looks to me however that it is done on fat32 There is 1 main program that I need on this computer specifically and it is darktable.

Can you point me to some guide that I can follow step by step please? My first attempt ended up with restoring the whole HDD (thanks to clonezilla).

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You could have removed GRUB from your hard disk pretty easily, just by deleting some files. That ship has sailed, though....

The easiest way to do what you want is:

  1. Start the Ubuntu installation media, but select the option to try Ubuntu without installing rather than the option to install Ubuntu.
  2. Launch a Terminal window.
  3. Type ubiquity -b or ubiquity --no-bootloader. The installer will run, but in such a way that it will not install GRUB.
  4. Select options to install Ubuntu on your USB flash drive. Be sure to include a FAT partition on the USB flash drive that will eventually hold a boot loader. (550MiB is a good size for this; it should not be the whole drive, and it should not be your root partition.)
  5. Install the boot loader of your choice on the USB flash drive's FAT partition. Install it as EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi on that partition. Personally, I'd use rEFInd for this purpose, since it's easy to configure and flexible; but as I'm rEFInd's maintainer, I'm biased.

When you want to boot Ubuntu, insert its USB flash drive and use the computer's built-in boot manager to pick the USB drive.

There are other ways to achieve your main goal. For instance, you could set up rEFInd on your hard disk. Configure it to make your Linux kernel the default, with Windows as the second choice. When the USB flash drive is not inserted, Windows will boot; and when it is inserted, Ubuntu will boot.

Rod Smith
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