Questions on booting off usb drive

[mechgamer123]

Hi all, just downloaded Ubuntu to a usb drive to try it out, I like it so far...
I am having a couple of problems though. First, I haven't fully installed, and I'm not sure if I can. I know I have a big enough drive (8gb), im just worried because I dont want to delete my windows partitions off my hard drive. When I click install, and it says:
The installer has detected that the following disks have mounted partitions:

/dev/sda, /dev/sdb

Do you want the installer to try to unmount the partitions on these disks before continuing? If you leave them mounted, you will not be able to create, delete, or resize partitions on these disks, but you may be able to install to existing partitions there.
I don't want to delete any other partitions, so will this automatically install to my usb drive? or will it install to my hard drive? I don't want to take chances...

Finally, i am having troubles installing drivers for my x-fi xtreme gamer. Do you know where to get these drivers?

[earthpigg]

for drivers: system -> admin -> hardware drivers.

for the rest: we need more detail, please. be exact. there are 5 ways to install ubuntu that i can recall off the top of my head.

ie: what is sda and sdb? hard drive and thumb drive? two internal hard drives? etc etc

[Mighty_Joe]

Some people disconnect their computer's hard drive before installing to USB just to be sure.
Personally, I use the manual partition selection rather than the automatic one, that way I can view all the possible drives and make sure I'm installing to my 8GB USB drive rather than my 100Gb hard drive.
Have a look at my post in this topic (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1193680). It has links to step-by-step instructions for installing on a USB drive.