Need help fixing USB drive, computers won't boot from it now

Discussion in 'Linux' started by Kallethen, Nov 2, 2008.

  1. Kallethen

    Kallethen

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    A little while back, I was considering putting Debian on my AAO and so followed the directions at http://wiki.debian.org/DebianAcerOne and went so far as to prepare the USB drive per the instructions there (using zcat on the command line to copy the image file to the USB).

    I suppose silly me for changing my mind, but I decided I didn't want to use Debian, as the wiki mentions some things not fully working. So, I've tried to undo what I did to the USB. So now I'm trying to get the USB drive back to how it was before. I've tried to redo the partitioning on the USB drive so that I have the full 4 GB again, and succeeded somewhat, but now I can't get my computers (my desktop nor the AAO) to boot from it.

    What do I need to do so I can once again boot from my USB so I can't try out a few distros in live mode and maybe eventually replace Linpus on my AAO?
     
    Kallethen, Nov 2, 2008
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  2. Kallethen

    johanv

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    By default USB-sticks aren't bootable. You need to install a boot manager on the USB stick to be able to boot from it. How did you try to make your USB stick bootable? Did you try to install a live distribution onto it?
     
    johanv, Nov 2, 2008
    #2
  3. Kallethen

    Kallethen

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    Used unetbootin to load live distros, yes. It gave me no trouble before, just run the program to load whatever distro I wanted to try out and then plugged it into the AAO and booted from USB.

    EDIT: If it helps to know, the USB in question is a 4GB Kingston DataTraveler.
     
    Kallethen, Nov 2, 2008
    #3
  4. Kallethen

    rbil

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    Is that flash key marked as "bootable"?

    Cheers.
     
    rbil, Nov 3, 2008
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  5. Kallethen

    johanv

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    I never used unetbootin myself, looks like a pretty neat application.

    Since it stopped working, I guess it will be a problem in the partition table indeed.

    What does your partition table look like right now?

    (I guess you can display it entering
    sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb
    or something like that in a terminal window)
     
    johanv, Nov 3, 2008
    #5
  6. Kallethen

    Kallethen

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    Sorry for no response, been busy painting and fixing up a room in the house.

    I found a solution to my problem. On a whim, I grabbed my wife's laptop (which has Windows on it) and used it's disk management utility to reformat the drive after I wiped the partition table again. It's working fine now; I can boot with it.
     
    Kallethen, Nov 7, 2008
    #6
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