Device for boot loader installation via USB

Question

I have used Ubuntu before, and really enjoyed using it, but it was set up by a friend of mine in the computer science department of our university, and we were making a dual-boot out of my netbook. Now, however, there is a different sort of problem. My home-base computer is a rather old mac book pro, and instead of dual-booting that, what I want to do is make my USB a bootable copy of Ubuntu. However, when I go to install it on the correct drive device, I am asked to choose "Device for boot loader installation," and I do not know which one to choose. I have found that it is much easier to do this initial installing on a PC, so I am using the ones that my University provides for students to use, but I do not want to break the computer's functionality since I might have to pay for it and I a rather broke grad student.

The current break down of my options:

/dev/sda /dev/sda1 ntfs 
/dev/sdc and /dev/sdc1 fat32  

The sda drives are the SATA drive for my school computer and the sdc drives are the one that I want to install ubuntu to.

Answer 1

/dev/sdc is your usb drive. If you want to install ubuntu in usb drive then select "/dev/sdc1" for your ubuntu operating system installation and for bootloader installation select "/dev/sdc". Keep in mind /dev/sdc1 for os installation and /dev/sdc is for bootloader installation. In this way your pc hard disk will be untouched and ubuntu will be totally installed to usb.

Answer 2

Here is a link explaining how to create a bootable usb stick via a windows machine:
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows

This link shows links for OSX and linux as well:
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

It takes a healthy chunk of time to run from start to finish, but is a very handy/powerful tool.

Answer 3

/sdc drive is probably your usb - its formated in fat32 (thats common for them). If you want to install ubuntu on usb without 'touching' pc, you need to select your usb as device for bootloader installation. As i said it's probably /sdc. This setting is (in my opinion :) ) very handy because you have full os on your usb key and you can run it on every ppc that supports usb boot. Also if you are afraid about damaging something you can run ubuntu cd in virtual machine and install it on usb - even if you screw something up its just virtual machine :)