Live USB – Troubleshooting Boot Issues from Flash Drive

live-usb

It's that time I boot a new OS on my system but I keep getting a "not a COM32R image" I wrote it on a half a dozen flash drives using two different computers using the l three different computers, and it doesn't work. I've been using Ubuntu 14.04.v what is going on? Both are 64bit systems and worked before, why not now?

Best Answer

General

This is a known bug in some versions of tools to create a USB boot drive. The problem is, that they use program parts from an old version of syslinux together with a new version of syslinux from the iso file. Updated versions of these tools can manage this problem. Cloning tools are not affected, because they put only data from the iso file into the USB pendrive.

Fortunately there are other tools. All current versions of Ubuntu come as hybrid iso files, and such files can be used to burn DVD disks and USB boot drives by cloning (copying every byte exactly as it is from the iso file to the target device).

There are also extracting tools, that are not affected by this bug.

Cloning tools

  • In Ubuntu and many other linux distros you can use

    • mkusb version 12 with mkusb-dus

      If you run standard Ubuntu, you need an extra instruction to get the repository Universe. (Kubuntu, Lubuntu ... Xubuntu have the repository Universe activated automatically.)

      sudo add-apt-repository universe  # only for standard Ubuntu

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mkusb/ppa  # and press Enter
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mkusb mkusb-nox usb-pack-efi

      enter image description here

      enter image description here

    • Disks alias gnome-disks which is often already installed, but a little more difficult to use:

      1. select drive

      2. select 'Restore' at the main menu

      3. select image to restore, in this case iso file

      enter image description here

  • In Windows you can use Win32 Disk Imager

Extracting tools

  • In MacOS you can use Unetbootin. Old versions may be affected by this bug, but if you get a new version, it should work well not only in MacOS, but also in Windows and Linux.

  • In Windows you can use Rufus. The main operating mode is extracting, but you can select dd mode to make it clone.

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