install ubuntu 10.04 LTS to a USB drive?

Your USB drive contains a live CD that lets you use boot from the drive to put Ubuntu in memory only if that's what you want. As an option, you can install the regular Ubuntu package to your hard drive and then it will boot from there. Those are the two choices. I'm not sure that you can make the USB drive do any more than you're able to do with it now.

Thanks for your reply.

Last week I installed ubuntu on my internal hard disk. I have done 75% of the kernel buid , it seems like I don't have sufficient memory to complete the build. Build fails at "Cannot allocate memory" OS error. I cannot format my PC to create free space, I have some important datas. Yesterday , I decided to install ubuntu 10.04 to a USB(140GB).

I downloaded the .iso file from ubuntu.com & unetbootin from sourceforge.net. I followed the procedure by running unetbootin .exe. And the rebooted my PC.

 1) I opened a console terminal and created a directory. I was happy that it's working. So I shutdown the pc properly. Next day I opened a terminal, I dont see the directory, which I created. Where did it go?It's happening every time I shutdown & restart the computer. this is one problem .

2)Again I created another one & started my work. when I try to build something, it says 0 disk space available. But I have 115GB free space.

Why is it giving this kind of problem? That's why I thought I have to follow the installation procedure, by clicking the Install LTS folder, which was on my ubuntu desktop after booting.....

Any help? I really have to submit my finish my kernel build.

I know what you want to do, but here's a better way:

Ubuntu has a tool to create a bootable USB drive leaving space for storing documents in the USD drive itself.

Look at this screenshot
http://blog.jorgeivanmeza.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/MakeStartupDisk.png

So Boot a Ubuntu Live CD and find that tool in the menu. It is in System > Administration > USB startup disk creator.

There use some megabytes as extra space so your documents are kept. Then you have alive Ubuntu in the USB where you can store files.

It doesn't seem as if Ubuntu fully installed on your hard drive from the USB drive. The boot files are usually put in last and if that part didn't go well, the booting won't go well either. If your live CD shows the regular desktop normally, you probably have enough memory to do the full install. (usually 256MB is the minimum though more is better)

The next problem is that the hard drive probably needs to be erased and the full disk used. It's probably best to let the installer manage the space it needs to put in Ubuntu. Ubuntu takes about 5 or 6GB to install in the part of the disk set for it, so the space for it has to be at least that large. The total size of the disk doesn't matter much, but the place where Ubuntu installs does.

Once you get Ubuntu properly installed, get the updates to get the patches and make it as stable as possible. Then put in your own directories and files.

Best of luck. I'm not sure I can help you further on this. You may need to use a new hard disk.

Thanks Federico Tello Gentile, that solved my question.

Thanks Federico Tello Gentile, that solved part my question.

So Boot a Ubuntu Live CD and find that tool in the menu. It is in System > Administration > USB startup disk creator.--->

I don' t see a USB startup disk creator. I see only startup disk creator, That just let me to install on my hard disk. I want to install on my USB. .

Use the startup disk creator to create a USB startup disk leaving space for documents as I told you.
Then that USB will have the closest thing you can get to Ubuntu installed on a USB drive. I don't know any better way.