
In the previous post, I described how to create such an installation from VirtualBox. On the contrary, installing Linux on a USB drive will give you the whole experience (and if the USB drive is fast, it’s almost like using Linux on a standard computer that’s undoubtedly the case for an external SSD, which are pretty cheap nowadays). I don’t want a live distribution: a live distribution only allows you a little testing experience, it’s not easily maintainable and upgradable, it’s harder to keep your data in there. I want to install Linux on a portable external USB SSD. The scenarioįirst of all, let’s summarize what I want to do.

In the end, we’ll get a UEFI bootable device, but without being scared of breaking the UEFI boot loader of your computer, since we’ll do that using a virtual machine. In this post, I’ll show how to install Linux on a USB drive, with UEFI support, using VirtualBox. However, you had to be careful during the installation to avoid overwriting the UEFI boot loader of your computer. In the second post, How to install Linux on a USB with UEFI support, I showed how to install Linux on the USB drive directly, without using VirtualBox, while creating a UEFI bootable device. In the first post, How to install Linux on a USB drive using Virtualbox, the USB drive with Linux installed could be used when booting from a computer with “Legacy boot” enabled: it could not boot if UEFI were the only choice in that computer.

Remember that the idea is to have a USB drive that will work as a portable Linux operating system on any computer. That’s the third post on installing Linux on a USB drive!
