[Cialug] USB flash drive not bootable

[Sean Flattery]

I used to occasionally run into USB drives that weren't bootable due to
some hardware limitation on the device.  Sometimes I could load up gparted
and flip the bootable bit on the drive to remedy this.  You could probably
use parted or fdisk to set it instead.

I used to play with the various multi-boot USB drive install tools like
YUMI and I kept running into problems where they'd fail to load any OS in
the GRUB menu.  The USB drives would run any solitary distro just fine
though. Perhaps it's worth trying a non multi-boot install method to
isolate the issue more.


Sean Flattery

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Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 15:23:44 -0500
From: Scott Burklund <wdmtrader at gmail.com>
To: cialug at cialug.org
Subject: [Cialug] USB flash drive not bootable
Message-ID:
        <CAAWjeA1O-u9tba49swm5zQGoCoT=USy3nWKuKuPcaChTf3wq8g at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

I have a Sandisk Cruzer Fit, 16 GB flash drive that recently I was able to
boot a Linux distro from.  I tried making it a multi boot drive using
xbootvs1.0beta14, YUMI-2.0.0.5, and Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.5.
3.  It
appears to work each time, but when I try booting I get "missing operating
system" error.  Using the same programs and computer but a different flash
drive the process is successful and I can boot it on several different
laptops.

I have tried formatting it many times with Windows and Linux, both quick
and complete formats.  It is formatted Fat32.  I can read/write files to it
each time.

I suspect I have a corrupted MBR or partition table.  However, I am at the
edge of my knowledge on the subject.  How can I fix this so I can use it as
a multi-boot drive?  I have access to both Win 7 and Linux computers.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Scott Burklund