Problems booting Linux via USB 3.0 port on a Dell laptop

Question

I have a problem with booting any live Linux distribution from a USB 3.0 flash drive (Kingston DataTraveler 100 G3 16 GB) on my on Dell Inspiron 7520 laptop running the latest BIOS version (A11).

When I do the same with USB 2.0 flash drive (Philips)—using Universal USB Installer 1.9.5.8 to create bootable USB flash drive—everything works fine. I go into boot manager and choose to boot from USB and it works.

But when I do it with the USB 3.0 flash drive and go into boot manager I don’t see option to boot from that USB 3.0 flash drive but instead it’s detected a a “Diskette Drive.” And when I try to boot from it, then I will see name of Linux distribution on the screen and then it freezes.

I have tried this with several Linux distributions but no success.

Solution

That seems to be a problem with xHCI support of your live system. It must include the xhci-hcd kernel module in its initramfs for proper USB3 support, otherwise you will experience a freeze during boot or other strange problems.

There has been a related bug report for Ubuntu.

Comments

[davidbaumann]

I would dd the first 100MB of the Stick, and then try to create again.

[user1275513]

Well, I just tried to boot it on another laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad) and it worked without problems. For the BIOS, it's not Win 8 EFI/UEFI. I tried to switch from Legacy to UEFI but no effect. For the USB 2 ports, apparently Inspiron 7520 doesn't have USB 2 port ...

[Xen2050]

Either something mysterious in the BIOS, or it just does not like that usb...