IMO this was an oversight or failure on the part of the installer. No properly working USB installer should touch the HDD in the host machine.

And while it may seem strange, as SkateZilla mentions you can double safe your work by disconnecting your HDDs while installing. I did this myself, so that the OpenSUSE installer would not detect my Win7 installation. This allows me to choose my boot HDD via the motherboard BIOS with no interaction from any bootloader.

Thats what I did for my Ubuntu Live USB, Disconnected HDDs, Inserted live DVD, chose install, Thumbstick shows up as a Drive, Install to thumb Stick, Change Boot Order in BIOS to USB->DVD->HDD

If USB Stick is present it boots to UBuntu, If Not it checks DVD Drive for Live CD, then Boots from HDD (My Mobo has the option to skip directly to HDD Boot by pressing ESC.)

My other System I Built for my brother I can set a Prompt at post (ie F1=Setup, F2=DVD, F3=USB, ESC=HDD), and it would auto boot HDD after 10 seconds.



If you dont want to unplug everything, Setup a Virtual Machine with no Shared HDDs, But with Optical/ISO and USB Drive,
Insert USB Key,
Load LiveDVD ISO or Insert in DVD Drive.
Have VM Boot the Live DVD, Choose install, select the USB Thumbstick.


I May start using Virtual Machines on all my other systems and just use the Same UBuntu Linux Key, Since the Video and Everything is nearly the same in the Virtual Machine Environment, its less hassle, just boot Virtual Machine off the USB Key inside Windows at home, or at office or friends house.

Thanks my men. I'll give it a try later tonight and report back.

Okay, Linux Mint was working great at home, and even on another computer here at the office. On my own computer, however, I get the blank screen on boot. Pressing ESC to view the boot process during start-up showed the following error:



A bit of research seems to suggest that this error is the fault of the USB installer, in this case Universal USB Installer. Some people report success using unetbootin to setup the USB stick; I'll have to grab that and give it a try later tonight.

Well, an update for anyone who was interested in this. Eventually I ditched the USB installers altogether. As a total Linux newbie, my understanding is very shaky, but I think both Universal USB Installer and unetbootin function on the same principle; running the install as a live CD and creating a casper-rw image to trick the install into seeing the image as persistent storage. Each install following this route worked for a few days, but would inevitably become corrupted after a few uses so that I could no longer even get a command prompt.

In the end I just totally ditched these installers, and went back to one of the original suggestions: just do a normal install from the CD to the USB stick as if it were a harddrive.

Paying closer attention this time in the install process, I did NOT install GRUB to my Windows harddrive. That was my bad in the first place, the option IS there in the installer. Though to be fair, it is set to the harddrive by default, and being the neophyte that I am, I had NFC what it meant.

Anyways, long story made short, the whole shebang is working great. Going on two weeks of use with no issues to report. I ended up going with Xubuntu as my distro of choice - I tried Linux Mint and a few others, but the final installs were just too big to fit comfortably on the flash drive. No problems whatsoever switching between computers, as well - it functions equally well on my work computer, home computer, and a few others I've tried.

Fun way to try Linux if you have a big flash drive kicking around.