Installing Ubuntu with Only a Netbook

There are two other options that work really well for installing Ubuntu on a netbook, or any other kind of Windows system. The approach is a little roundabout, but you can install Ubuntu using only a netbook and a USB drive and not burn anything to CD-ROM. Most netbooks ship with Microsoft Windows XP or Windows 7 installed. UsingWindows, download the netbook installation disk onto the netbook. At this point, you have two options: create a bootable USB device from Windows or use the Windows Ubuntu Installer. To create a bootable USB drive, download unetbootin for Windows from unetbootin.sourceforge.net. This program works like the usb-creator, allowing you to select an ISO and install it on a USB device.

With Windows, you can also open up the ISO image. Sitting at the root of the disk image is a program called wubi.exe.This is the WindowsUbuntu Installer. UsingWubi, you can installUbuntu as an application under Windows that runs a separate operating system.Wubiworks by adding itself to theWindows boot menu. This effectively turns the Windows system into a dual-boot computer.

After installing Wubi, reboot the system. You will see Ubuntu listed in the boot menu. If you boot Ubuntu, it will use the Windows boot manager to run an Ubuntu environment. From Ubuntu, you can access the host Windows system through /host and /media. More importantly, you can download the usb-creator for Ubuntu and create a bootable USB device.

Regardless of the approach you take, you should now have a bootable USB drive (or SD Card or other type of removable memory). Tell your netbook to boot off the new media. For example, with an Asus 1005HA netbook, you can press Esc after pressing the power-on button and select the SD Card or USB drive as the boot device. At this point, you can install Ubuntu for the netbook.


HIDDEN DISK PARTITIONS
Many netbooks and laptops have a boot option to restore the operating system. This works by accessing a separate partition on the hard drive that contains a bootable operating system and will restore the system to factory defaults.

During the install process, use the advanced disk partitioning option. This will show you the name of the emergency recovery partition. (It is usually named something like ‘‘XP recovery.’’) There may also be a small Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) partition used to improve boot times. If you don’t want to accidentally press a button and overwrite your Ubuntu netbook with Windows, then be sure to reformat the drive (or remove the XP recovery partition) during the installation. If you remove the emergency recovery partition, then the operating system will ignore requests for recovery. While removing the EFI partition (fdisk partition type 0xEF) will not harm anything, keeping the small (usually 8 MB) partition can dramatically improve boot times.

Source of Information : Wiley Ubuntu Powerful Hacks And Customizations