How To Create A UEFI Bootable Ubuntu USB Drive Using Windows
Mount The Ubuntu ISO Within Windows
This guide shows you how to create a UEFI bootable Ubuntu USB drive.
The point of creating a USB drive in this way is to ensure that when you run Ubuntu and start the installer you will definitely be installing Ubuntu using the UEFI version and not the standard BIOS version.
The USB drive created using this guide will not work on computers without the UEFI bootloader.
If you don't have a UEFI bootloader follow this guide to create a bootable Linux USB drive.
For this guide you will need a blank USB drive with at least 2 gigabytes of space.
As an additional bonus this guide will also show you how to make the drive persistent so that changes made in the live mode are kept for each subsequent boot.
The first thing to do is download Ubuntu by visiting http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop.
(Make sure you download the 64 bit version of Ubuntu)
After you have downloaded Ubuntu you will need to open it with a tool that can mount ISO files.
The tool I used for opening the ISO is Cyberlink Power2Go. Simply download the software, install it and then double click the Ubuntu ISO and open it with Cyberlink.
Another alternative is the popular 7-Zip software. 7-Zip can open all sorts of compressed files including zip files, rar files and of course ISO files.
Open up the downloaded Ubuntu ISO using the ISO viewing software of your choice and extract the files to the blank USB drive.
Check The USB Drive Has An Active Partition
The next step in making a UEFI bootable Ubuntu USB drive is to ensure the USB drive has an active boot partition.
As you are creating a UEFI bootable USB drive this guide assumes you are using Windows 8 (or 8.1).
Go to the desktop by clicking the desktop tile or by clicking the Windows button on your keyboard.
Move your mouse to the bottom left corner and right click with the mouse. (If you are using Windows 8.1 it will be the start button you right click but for standard Windows 8 it is just the bottom left corner).
Choose the disk management from the menu that appears.
You will see a list of disks, one of which will be your USB drive. Make sure that the drive has the words (Active, Primary Partition) listed. This will almost certainly be the case unless you partitioned the USB drive.
If your Ubuntu files aren't on the active partition you can set that partition to active by right clicking on the drive and selecting the option "Mark partition as active".
Turn Off Fast Startup
In order to boot a UEFI bootable Ubuntu USB drive you need to turn off fast startup.
Move the mouse to the bottom left corner and right click so that the menu appears again.
Choose "power options".
When the power options screen appears click the second menu item on the left hand side called "Choose what the power button does".
At the bottom of the window is "Shutdown Settings". Make sure the "Turn on fast startup" checkbox is unchecked and click "Save Changes".
Reboot Windows And Boot Into Ubuntu
Move the mouse to the top right corner and when the icons appear click on the settings icon (looks like a cog).
Hold down the shift key and click on the power icon.
Select restart and leave the shift key held down until the computer restarts.
The UEFI Boot Menu
By holding down the shift key you will see a screen similar to the one above.
With Ubuntu 14.04 it is no longer absolutely necessary to turn off the secure boot mode but you may need to do this if you can't get the USB drive to boot.
To turn off secure boot click on troubleshooting and then choose UEFI firmware settings. (See steps 5b and 5c).
To try booting without turning off secure boot click on the "Use a device" option and then select the USB EFI drive.
Ubuntu should now load in live mode.
(If Ubuntu loads correctly you can skip to step 6).
Remember you can get back to this screen at any point by holding down the shift key and restarting Windows 8.
Troubleshooting
If Ubuntu doesn't load you may need to turn off secure boot mode.
Get back to the UEFI boot menu shown in step 5 by holding down the shift key whilst rebooting Windows 8.
Click on troubleshooting and the above screen will appear.
Now click on UEFI firmware settings.
To make it possible to install applications and save settings on a live USB drive you need to make it persistent.
Ubuntu looks for a file called casper-rw in the root partition in order to provide persistence.
To create a casper-rw file using Windows you can use a piece of software from pendrivelinux.com called PDL Caster-RW Creator. Download the application by clicking the link and then double click the executable to open it.
Make sure your Ubuntu USB drive is inserted and select the drive letter within Casper-RW Creator.
Now drag the slider across to determine how big you want the Casper-RW file to be. (The bigger the file, the more you can save).
Click "Create".
To get your USB drive to use the Casper-RW file open up Windows Explorer and navigate to /Boot/Grub.
Edit the file grub.cfg by right clicking the file and selecting "Open With" and then notepad.
Look for the following menuentry text and add the word persistent as shown in bold below.
Save the file.
Reboot your computer whilst holding down the shift key and boot back into Ubuntu.
Programs and settings will now be remembered each and every time you boot into Ubuntu from the USB drive.
This guide shows you how to create a UEFI bootable Ubuntu USB drive.
The point of creating a USB drive in this way is to ensure that when you run Ubuntu and start the installer you will definitely be installing Ubuntu using the UEFI version and not the standard BIOS version.
The USB drive created using this guide will not work on computers without the UEFI bootloader.
If you don't have a UEFI bootloader follow this guide to create a bootable Linux USB drive.
For this guide you will need a blank USB drive with at least 2 gigabytes of space.
As an additional bonus this guide will also show you how to make the drive persistent so that changes made in the live mode are kept for each subsequent boot.
The first thing to do is download Ubuntu by visiting http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop.
(Make sure you download the 64 bit version of Ubuntu)
After you have downloaded Ubuntu you will need to open it with a tool that can mount ISO files.
The tool I used for opening the ISO is Cyberlink Power2Go. Simply download the software, install it and then double click the Ubuntu ISO and open it with Cyberlink.
Another alternative is the popular 7-Zip software. 7-Zip can open all sorts of compressed files including zip files, rar files and of course ISO files.
Open up the downloaded Ubuntu ISO using the ISO viewing software of your choice and extract the files to the blank USB drive.
Check The USB Drive Has An Active Partition
The next step in making a UEFI bootable Ubuntu USB drive is to ensure the USB drive has an active boot partition.
As you are creating a UEFI bootable USB drive this guide assumes you are using Windows 8 (or 8.1).
Go to the desktop by clicking the desktop tile or by clicking the Windows button on your keyboard.
Move your mouse to the bottom left corner and right click with the mouse. (If you are using Windows 8.1 it will be the start button you right click but for standard Windows 8 it is just the bottom left corner).
Choose the disk management from the menu that appears.
You will see a list of disks, one of which will be your USB drive. Make sure that the drive has the words (Active, Primary Partition) listed. This will almost certainly be the case unless you partitioned the USB drive.
If your Ubuntu files aren't on the active partition you can set that partition to active by right clicking on the drive and selecting the option "Mark partition as active".
Turn Off Fast Startup
In order to boot a UEFI bootable Ubuntu USB drive you need to turn off fast startup.
Move the mouse to the bottom left corner and right click so that the menu appears again.
Choose "power options".
When the power options screen appears click the second menu item on the left hand side called "Choose what the power button does".
At the bottom of the window is "Shutdown Settings". Make sure the "Turn on fast startup" checkbox is unchecked and click "Save Changes".
Reboot Windows And Boot Into Ubuntu
Move the mouse to the top right corner and when the icons appear click on the settings icon (looks like a cog).
Hold down the shift key and click on the power icon.
Select restart and leave the shift key held down until the computer restarts.
The UEFI Boot Menu
By holding down the shift key you will see a screen similar to the one above.
With Ubuntu 14.04 it is no longer absolutely necessary to turn off the secure boot mode but you may need to do this if you can't get the USB drive to boot.
To turn off secure boot click on troubleshooting and then choose UEFI firmware settings. (See steps 5b and 5c).
To try booting without turning off secure boot click on the "Use a device" option and then select the USB EFI drive.
Ubuntu should now load in live mode.
(If Ubuntu loads correctly you can skip to step 6).
Remember you can get back to this screen at any point by holding down the shift key and restarting Windows 8.
Troubleshooting
If Ubuntu doesn't load you may need to turn off secure boot mode.
Get back to the UEFI boot menu shown in step 5 by holding down the shift key whilst rebooting Windows 8.
Click on troubleshooting and the above screen will appear.
Now click on UEFI firmware settings.
To make it possible to install applications and save settings on a live USB drive you need to make it persistent.
Ubuntu looks for a file called casper-rw in the root partition in order to provide persistence.
To create a casper-rw file using Windows you can use a piece of software from pendrivelinux.com called PDL Caster-RW Creator. Download the application by clicking the link and then double click the executable to open it.
Make sure your Ubuntu USB drive is inserted and select the drive letter within Casper-RW Creator.
Now drag the slider across to determine how big you want the Casper-RW file to be. (The bigger the file, the more you can save).
Click "Create".
To get your USB drive to use the Casper-RW file open up Windows Explorer and navigate to /Boot/Grub.
Edit the file grub.cfg by right clicking the file and selecting "Open With" and then notepad.
Look for the following menuentry text and add the word persistent as shown in bold below.
menuentry "Try Ubuntu without installing" {
set gfxpayload=keep
linux /casper/vmlinuz.efi file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash persistent --
initrd /casper/initrd.lz
}
Save the file.
Reboot your computer whilst holding down the shift key and boot back into Ubuntu.
Programs and settings will now be remembered each and every time you boot into Ubuntu from the USB drive.
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