Kevin,<br><br>First, be aware USB is fairly slow, esp firefox. Also, not all machines allow booting from USBt. :) None-the-less, I have always had a USB disk with Ubuntu on it since 2007 or so for times when I'm on the go.<br> <br>It's really easy now to set up. just go to System->Preferances->Usb startup disk creater and let it guide you through the process. You'll need the ISO for the version of ubuntu you want to install still though.<br> <br>As for the running your system on your usb stick on virtualbox, I think that is probably a no go there as is uses a disk image format. That might be a fun thing to play with and try to get working though!<br><br>~Dereck<br> <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Kevin Stagg <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kstagg@gmail.com">kstagg@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div>I hope this is the right forum, and could use some assistance.</div> <div> </div> <div>I have a 160GB Western Digital External Hard Drive and I'd like to load Ubuntu 9.04 onto it so that I can have the latter OS with me wherever I go. Usually the hard drive is attached to my Vista Ultimate pc here at home.</div> <div> </div> <div>Is there a tutorial out there that walks a <u>newbie</u> step by step on how this can be accomplished? I see there are tutorials out there but everone I've looked at seems to assume that the user has an extensive background in Linux, which I do not. </div> <div> </div> <div>Also, if I were to load Ubuntu on my ext hard drive, could I access Ubuntu while still running Vista on the desktop? Would it be similar to having a vmware environment of Ubuntu running on a Windows platform?</div> <div> </div> <div>Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.</div> <div> </div> <div>Many thanks -<br>Kevin</div> <div> </div> </blockquote></div><br>