Inside The Mind Of Timothy Allard

How To Install Chrome OS With A USB Drive

Posted on the November 25th, 2009 under Gadgets, Google, Industry News, Web 3.0 by Timothy Allard

Ok, so last night I was able to boot up my Gateway netbook into Chrome OS and here is what I found. This guide will help you get set up in under 15 minutes. There are 6 steps to do this and if you are very eager to get Chrome os on your computer to play with, then this is a great tutorial to experiment with.

• Download Chrome OS Torrent
• Download IMG Extractor
• Format USB Drive
• Copy To USB Drive
• Change Boot Order
• Boot In Chrome

Right now, there are two options to get Chrome OS on your netbook. the first option is to download VMWare and run it as a virtual machine through Windows 7, Vista, or XP. This option tends to be slow, kind of annoying and everything has to be done through a window. The other option is to put it on a USB stick and boot up from the drive. I chose the last option, the USB stick and this is how i got Chrome OS on my netbook.

First what you need to do is download the Chrome OS developer torrent, which is about 300mbs. Once downloaded, unzip the file, and you will be left with an image file (img). This image file contains the goods. Next we need to download a special IMG extractor which will automatically copy it to the USB drive. Next, get your USB stick and format it to NTFS. First make sure you back up everything on the drive if there is anything on it. You can format the drive by going to “My Computer”, find the drive, right click and click “format”. This should bring up a dialog where you can name the drive, and then check off quick format. Once that is done click format. The process should only take about 1 minute depending on what was on the USB previously.

Now we are ready, just to confirm, we have our IMG file, the IMG extractor and we also have our freshly formatted USB drive.

Pop in the USB drive and open up the IMG extractor. We need to do two things now - browse to the img file and also determine what drive letter the USB drive is, and use the dropdown to set it. This way the extractor will know where to place the files. If you do not know what drive letter the USB stick is you can go to “My Computer” and it will say it there.

Once you browsed to the IMG file, and the drive letter is changed, click “extract”. This should take a minute or two.

Once complete you now will have a fresh copy of Chromium OS on your USB drive! Now all you have to do is one last step and you will be on your way to booting in Chrome.

Restart your computer and get into the BIOS. Don’t be scared, we just need to make one quick change to the boot startup. Depending on your type of computer, it may vary, but mine was F2. Press F2 over and over again, before the Windows logo screen appears. A DOS looking screen should appear and unsing the arrow keys navigate to “boot”. This screen has a list of boot options and the order they should run. Make sure you have the USB stick as number one. This means it will look for the USB stick first, then check to see if an operation system is installed on a hardrive. Save and exit.

Your computer should now restart and a blue Chromium OS should appear with two fields, for a username and password. Make sure you have a plugged ethernet connection as wireless is not currently enabled.

But that is it! Let me know your thoughts, how your experience was. How you feel about this and more!
I will be following up with a “Hands On View” post shortly.

Thanks to hexxeh for allowing all of this to happen.