so I have an old laptop without a HDD. I'm trying to make it boot to Ubuntu from a USB flash drive.
My main computer is a Mac, and I tried to make the USB drive bootable in Ubuntu via the Mac, but I couldn't figure it out.
So now I installed Virtual Box and installed Ubuntu on to the VM there. Is it possible to using the VM Ubuntu make my flashdrive bootable in Ubuntu?
Thanks so much!
For that you will need to enable USB in Virtualbox: How to set up USB for Virtualbox?
Then you can install Multisystem in Ubuntu in Virtualbox to your flash drive and choose the linux distribution you want to install.
Note: The Virtualbox uses USB2 drivers where your computer might have only USB3. This must not be compatible 100%, but you can still try it.
You are looking for unetbootin for the Mac OS. You can do this in Ubuntu via your VM but that's not really required. This is pretty easy to do, just go download the Mac OS file and run it. You can get that here - it's the one in the upper right. I won't link to the direct download because that may change in the future.
Format your USB to FAT32 using your standard tools. Then run unetbootin that you downloaded above. You point it to the .ISO that you previously downloaded or you can have it download automatically. When done, simply click exit (not reboot - unless you want to reboot, that is) and place the USB stick into the old laptop.
During the old laptop's boot cycle, during the POST (Power On Self Test) there will be an option to change your boot device. This is often F12 but varies with laptop manufacturers. If this is not an option then simply enter your BIOS (Basic Input Output Settings - sometimes called System Settings) and change the boot order to move the USB device to the top. If you don't have the ability (some old laptops do not) to boot to USB then you'll want to burn the ISO as a DVD (as an image, not a direct copy) and then select to boot to DVD in the boot menu or via changing BIOS settings.
