Ubuntu pen drive mountable on windows?

Soldato
Joined
3 Feb 2010
Posts
3,034
Hi guys

So for my uni web app dev degree i've got a pen-drive with ubuntu installed, we use it for all of our work and its pretty much a requirement.

Since installing my 1080ti into my rig i've had a nightmare getting it working on this rig. I've tried everything to no avail..

Is there a piece of software that will allow me to easily mount the drive in a windows application as a virtual machine or something?

Cheers
 
Man of Honour
Joined
19 Oct 2002
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29,509
Location
Surrey
As a quick fix you could try installing virtualbox, then set USB passthrough so the virtualbox guest boots from the 'passed through' USB drive.

There probably will be a way to copy the USB contents into vbox as a bootable drive. But the above would be a quick fix.
 
Associate
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7 Aug 2017
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I'm pretty sure I've done it before, you have to do some command line as it isn't in the GUI. I can't remember the exact steps but from a quick google there are plenty of walkthroughs.

The link I gave gives a procedure that uses a .vmdk that points to the USB device. Unfortunately, with this procedure one has to run VBox as administrator in order to use this .vmdk due to the permissions needed on the USB device - this might give permissions headaches later if VBox config file ownership is changed and isn't ideal for security, but should be OK if not using VBox for anything else. There is an alternative which is to use the Plop boot manager as this gives a USB boot option, but I'm not familiar with this.

As a quick fix you could try installing virtualbox, then set USB passthrough so the virtualbox guest boots from the 'passed through' USB drive.

I thought this too, but when trying it out earlier I saw that VBox's boot manager has no USB boot option (you have the choice of "Hard Disk", "Optical", "Floppy" and "Network") - which is why there is the workaround of fudging the USB drive as a .vmdk hard disk image (or Plop). I've used USB passthrough fine, but only after the guest OS is already installed and booted.
 
Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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2,953
Location
Greater Manchester
I have literally just completed installing Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS on a new machine with the same GPU and Intel Core i7!

The two steps to make it all work were:

1) Edit the Grub2 startup command (edit /etc/default/grub) and add the command "nomodeset" after "quiet splash" for the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT variable, this effectively disables any Intel GPU functionality.
2) Install the latest Ubuntu NVIDIA propriety driver package (384.111 at the time of writing on 16.04.x), I do this using the Additional Drivers GUI app but it can be done through your favourite package manager at the command line if you like.

I would suggest doing this to get a proper, working installation before going down to the VM route personally!
 
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