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I have no hard drive installed, Only USB thumb drive. Will this be a problem?

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3 Answers

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It will work just fine. I've often used it as a tool to diagnose computers with hard drives that have quit working.

If you want to save stuff, you could plug in a thumb drive or a USB hard drive and save it to that. A thumb drive will show up just like it would on a normal Ubuntu install.

Another option if you want persistence is to make a LiveUSB drive with Ubuntu's startup disk creator and use the option to have persistence.

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Exactly, just what I needed. So the system would be running 2GB ram and run a live USB with persistence, lets say 8gb thumbdrive. Would this work. IYO – Ringtail Feb 14 '12 at 1:56
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Should work just fine. Do note that persistence doesn't seem to store things like packages installed. It just seems to keep stuff in the home folder. – Azendale Feb 14 '12 at 4:06
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As long as you have RAM go for it, a LiveCD does not need a hard disk or even a writable media installed to run properly.

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is 2GB enough to run Natty – Ringtail Feb 14 '12 at 2:05
2GB is enough. The whole Ubuntu install is 2GB as far as I know, and you won't be needing all that at once, so yeah. – Ruben Bakker Feb 14 '12 at 16:47
up vote 3 down vote

It should work fine, I've used a live CD on machines with totally broken hard drives with no problem.

If you want persistence you'll need to boot off a USB key instead of a CD.

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This would be a good thing. Is there a persistence while using the CD/DVD – Ringtail Feb 14 '12 at 1:49
The CD will be mounted read-only, so no. Any changes are lost on reboot. – Caesium Feb 14 '12 at 14:53

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