USB Stick won't boot

Question

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.

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

Was your old flash drive bootable before and I had the same problem with win32image writer I used hp usb format tool and it worked pretty well try that to see if it works I am noob so don't know much

Also here is the link for hp format tool

http://download.cnet.com/HP-USB-Disk-Storage-Format-Tool/3000-2094_4-10974082.html

Sorry to keep editing but for me I installed ubuntu right after hp formatting my flash drive so for me it worked

Comments

[Dana]

Yes, I've used it many times to boot when I want to try a different distro. I just formatted it through gparted. I removed the lba flag from the partition, and we'll see what happens now. If that doesn't work, I'll try your suggestion of the HP tool. Thanks a bunch.

[Dana]

THe boot order didn't change. The Chrome OS was a live usb installation, so it wasn't dual booted, so it never changed the boot order. I'm using this on an old eeepc , and just use the <esc> key to get to the boot menu, and choose the USB stick.

[Rodrigo Martins de Oliveira]

Oh, sorry for my misundertanding, so I think that Goku (lovely name) answer should solve your problem.

[Dana]

Not a problem! I'm currently formatting the stick with HP utility, because the formatting through gparted didn't do anything. I'll post back when the formatting completes.

[Dana]

edit Now, after formatting using the HP Formatter, I can use any Windows based partition editor and reformat the stick and it will work properly. Don't know why, don't really care. I now format all my USB sticks FIRST, with the HP Formatter, and all is well after that. I'd love an explanation from HP on that one.