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Can't boot from USB suddenly.

Prinny

Prinny

Resident Linux Nutcase
So, bit of a perplexing problem here.

As usual, I get bored of operating systems, and was hopping back to another distro as usual.

Anyway, to make a short story long, I'm not sure if my USB drive is fried, or what's going on here.

Basically, I downloaded said ISO (Debian spin, Snowlinux 3.1) and I used my usual unetbootin on my Windows partition to write it to a flash drive. It sees my drive, and succeeds. Huzzah, right?

Wrong.

What I then do is reboot, press F9 to boot from USB....and bam, boots into windows.

Okayyy. So I thought it was my computer. Plugged it up into another PC, F12 for startup order....Bam...Windows.

Weird.

So that being said, I tried an 8GB SD Card. Start up order....bam...windows.

Hmm. I'm a bit perplexed by this...

Any of you PC Guru's have any thoughts/suggestions? I've formatted both the SD card, and the flash drive multiple times. Tried FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS. Just to say that I tried everything.

Any thoughts and suggestions would be appreciated!
 
Where is Windows coming from? Do both computers still have Windows installed?

Have you tried flashing a fresh image onto the USB drive?
 
also check to make sure you still have boot flag on the usb drives if its not there then they wont boot up.
 
unetbootin has never worked for me consistently. Hardly ever do my USB's remain bootable.

I much prefer using YUMI from pendrivelinux. Try that...
 
yummi thanks for the heads up :)

if that doesnt work for you go command line and use dd

dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/usbdevice

WARNING
Make sure that the usbdevice is the one you want to have the image on as dd will eliminate all data on the device.
 
Yeah, I almost ALWAYS use the dd command. It's just better than unetbootin, I feel.

Anyway, I think it's just my flash drive. Which is weird, because it works as a storage medium, but not as a bootable drive anymore. I didn't remove any boot flags, so who knows.

Got a new 8gb one on clearance at Walgreens for $4. So I can't complain.

Thanks for the answers, though, everyone!
 
argedion said:
if that doesnt work for you go command line and use dd

dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/usbdevice
Click to expand...
Hmmm...dd is convenient, but I wish I had something that let me choose between multiple ISO images. Anybody know of a utility that can do that? It looks like most use a DOS environment and something like SYSLINUX to load the ISO image. Does anyone know if the config files can be edited to use menus?

I have this tiny little 32GB USB drive that could hold all of my utility ISOs and a few full OS installs as well. I want that!!!!
 
h4x0rj3ff said:
if your sure your usb is good i recently found plop boot manager. i was trying to boot my pc from usb only to find the bios didnt support it. check it out. even if your bios does support it (im assuming it does because you have done it before...) nice tool to have

Plop - Home - Free Boot Manager with lot of features like USB, CDROM, partition hiding and much more. Plop Linux boot from CD, USB PXE Network and much more
Click to expand...

Yeah plop is great. I actually put it on yumi as a boot-to-cd option
 
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