I recently got a 64GB USB stick and planned to make it a system repair multitool, with different Linux and Windows installers and live images, but I seem to have a USB stick that cannot be booted.
Pendrive Linux' Yumi installer doesn't recognize it, and only lists it when "show all devices" is checked.
The Windows 7 USB install tool doesn't recognize it either.
When putting an image on it with either Yumi or diskpart and xcopy, none of the three PCs I tested are able to boot it, but none of them have problems booting from another smaller, slower 8GB drive.
The HP USB format tool, as mentioned in this answer does format it, but that does not enable bootability. I have tried both NTFS and FAT32 filesystems, but neither succeed.
What causes this? I was under the impression that USB sticks are just storage devices (like optical discs) and that it was enough to have the correct files/structures to make it bootable. Is the device missing some critical feature necessary to make it bootable?
Additional Info:
The mainboards of the PCs are
the GA-MA770T-UD3 (AM3 socket, probably a bit old),
the GA-Q87TN (1150 socket),
and whatever is inside the Dell XPS12 9Q33.
The latter two run Haswell processors with UEFI, I can't imagine that a 64GB stick would pose a problem.
I also tried formatting with the Windows tools, and tried to make a partition of only 20GB.
Best Answer
Just want to share my experience. We burn a lot of bootable ISO's to flashdrives to setup anything from Windows server series to Windows 7 through 10. We ONLY have issues with Kingston drives when it comes to this. I spoke to a guy at tech support from Kingston and after a lot of useless info it basically boils down to its not guaranteed to boot. So i tried all the other troubleshooting options like diskpart, full formats and even the linux way of partitioning and formatting. So several days later i checked my bios and as always the USB disk shows as a harddrive like any other brand of USB disk. I noticed there was a note in the right hand page to "press N" to remove the Kingston USB disk as a "harddrive" which will then mark it as a removeable disk. After pressing N the disk disappeared from the harddisk list and i save/rebooted. It works perfect now!!! This wasnt necessary for any of my other USB disks which booted perfectly every time on various hardware platforms except for my Kingston G3 and Fury 3.0 drives.
Hope this could help some other frustrated techie :D