Live USB Stick does not boot

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi! I’ve followed the instructions at Live USB stick - openSUSE for creating a bootable USB stick. I have attempted this with both a 32 bit and 64 bit image. Unfortunately my system will not boot up the stick - it just loads my hard disk as normal.

Background info

  1. I have checked the iso images against the checksum and they are ok;
  2. I have used the same images to create bootable CDs which work fine;
  3. My machine IS capable of booting a USB stick - by copying syslinux onto the stick, the machine does see the stick
  4. The order of boot in BIOS is stick first. Again, I have proven this works ok using a utility called USB Boot Tester.

I am unsure what to try next. I recall reading on this forum there was a problem booting from USB stick if the computer also had a CD drive. That was in an early version of LiveCD. Could the problem still be extant? I can’t find the actual thread unfortunately otherwise I would link to it.

Any suggestions gratefully received.
Thanks in advance for looking.

2

Are you able to format your usb device as FAT32? And try again? I was having trouble one time and doing that seemed to clear it up. And using the ‘dd’ command worked fine. I currently have 11.3 M1 on a usb stick

3

Yep - tried that to no avail :frowning:
<code>
laptop4:~ # umount /dev/sdb1
laptop4:~ # mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdb1
mkfs.vfat 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)
laptop4:~ # dd if=/tmp/openSUSE-11.2-KDE4-LiveCD-i686.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M; sync
169+1 records in
169+1 records out
710934528 bytes (711 MB) copied, 82.4601 s, 8.6 MB/s
laptop4:~ #
</code>

4

Have you tried unetbootin?

5

Yep - tried that to no avail :frowning:

laptop4:~ # umount /dev/sdb1
laptop4:~ # mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdb1
mkfs.vfat 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)
laptop4:~ # dd if=/tmp/openSUSE-11.2-KDE4-LiveCD-i686.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M; sync
169+1 records in
169+1 records out
710934528 bytes (711 MB) copied, 82.4601 s, 8.6 MB/s
laptop4:~ #
6

Not tried unetbootin because the front page UNetbootin - Homepage and Downloads doesn’t reference openSUSE 11.2 which is what I want.

7

You can still try it. You just use the option to point to your own .iso

8

Many thanks for that - unetbootin worked for me. :slight_smile:

I have blogged instructions for anyone wishing to follow this process at Bootable openSUSE Linux 11.2 64bit on a USB Memory Stick | Badzilla

I have also blogged a few troubleshooting thoughts at Bootable Linux USB Memory Stick Problem Solving | Badzilla

9

Good news. Well done!