Install Linux Mint 14 on USB Drive

I had tried to install Ubuntu on USB drive before, but it failed. I don't know why. Today, I installed Linux Mint on USB drive again and it success unbelievably. I don't know why either. And I found out that we could install on USB driver through Virtualbox. Virtualbox makes it more convenience to install because we can do another thing with computer while installing at the same time.

First of all, download Virtualbox, and a Virtualbox extension package is also needed to make USB work. Download the latest Linux Mint iso file. After those files are downloaded and installed completely, toggle enable USB 2.0 in Virtualbox >settings >USB and mount the iso file in the Virtualbox. Then we are ready to begin.

Boot the virtual machine with CD of Linux Mint, mount USB drive and click install.

The most important thing is here, choose your USB driver instead of hard drive to install, and remember to install the MBR on the USB drive as well.

The rest of steps are the same with installing linux on hard drive. After the installation finished, it's time to test the USB drive.

Notably, there is no way to boot virtual machine with USB devices directly, but we can make the USB device as a virtual hard drive, then we can boot from the USB drive. So here is what we going to do next. Go to Virtualbox installed folder in Command mode, and type the command:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename D:\VirtualBox\usb.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive4

Where "D:\VirtualBox\usb.vmdk" stands for your virtual disk location, and "PhysicalDrive4" stands for your USB drive (The number might be different in different computer).

Then, create another virtual machine with usb.vmdk, and it's done!

Here is the screenshot of my desktop after tuned:

NOTE:
The most worst thing of Linux Mint is that it doesn't install input method in default so we need to install it by ourself if we need one. Go to command line and install ibus.

sudo apt-get install ibus