Ubuntu – USB Stick won’t boot

bootformatlive-usbusb-drive

So I wanted to play around with CHrome OS, and installed the Vanilla version of Chromium OS to my trusty USB Stick. I used the Win32DiskImager.exe to install the OS to the USB stick. All went well, but I decided I didn't really want to use the OS, so I formatted the USB Stick in WIndows using the Minitool Partition WIzard. I finished with that and downloaded openSUSE, and then installed it with your normal Linux Live USB Creator.

That's when everything got screwy. It wouldn't boot after that. Files could be copied to the stick, but it's not bootable anymore. I tried unetbootin after that with the same result, and then one last time with the generic live usb creator from linuxpendrive.com.

Any idea what could have happened? Was it the win32diskimager that toasted the usb stick?

And is there any way to get back to a bootable state? I was thinking of booting into gparted and formatting from there to see what would happen if I formatted through Linux instead. (Oh, I should mention I tried a regular good 'ol format through Windows 7 as well.

Any help would be appreciated.

Best Answer

I have found that using:

fdisk /dev/sdX

(where X is the identifier of the USB device in question - make SURE this is correct!) and deleting the partition table:

  • p - to print (display) the partition table
  • d - to delete (gives choice of partition if more than one)
  • w - to write the changes

...seems to work on rebooting. If that doesn't work, zero-filling the USB stick then re-imaging it (and possibly deleting the partition table as per the above) might work.

To do this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX

BE WARNED that chosing the wrong device as X will destroy the data on it.

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