9.10 makes unbootable USB stick?

[trevorbsmith]

I have a 4 gig Kingston USB stick. I have an Eee PC with 4 gig internal flash drive (no hard drive). I can't find the specs but I believe it is roughly equivalent to an Eee PC 900 or something.

About a year ago I downloaded the then latest version of ubuntu for netbooks, created a bootable USB drive from my Mac, as per the instructions at:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...n/FromUSBStick

or whatever the equivalent site was then. It booted fine, it installed fine and everything was great.

Eventually the tiny flash drive in my EeePC got full. I couldn't upgrade to the new 9.10 distro through auto updates because there wasn't enough room to download them.

I tried to delete some old kernels and then delete some other stuff. I broke my linux installation and now it won't boot to a desktop. I can get a login prompt and I can boot to the fail safe terminal but not much else.

So, I tried repeating the steps above.

I downloaded the NEW version of ubuntu netbook remix from:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook

I followed the instructions for making a bootable USB stick from the first link above. I used the EXACT SAME USB stick as last time (in fact, it still had the older version of the ubuntu install files on it).

There were no errors "creating" the USB drive and it can be mounted on my Mac and I can see the files are on it.

I stuck it into my EeePC and rebooted and hit the ESC key and selected the Kingston USB drive to boot from. The light on the USB drive flashed some, then the internal flash drive light flashed some and the EeePC booted from the internal drive.

I rebooted and went into the bios settings and made triple sure that it was set to boot from USB drive first and rebooted. The same thing happened (it "looked at" the USB drive, then booted from the internal drive).

I repeated the above a dozen times. I REinstalled the ubuntu files on the USB drive from my Mac. I repeated. Still the same.

I redownloaded the ubuntu files and did everything from scratch. Again no errors "creating" the USB drive and it can be mounted on my Mac and I can see the files are on it, but again, it is absolutely useless because it is unbootable.

I tried booting my Mac from the USB drive and my Mac didn't recognize it as a bootable drive either.

I found another 4 gig USB drive and repeated the steps above with it. It was exactly the same: no errors creating it, the drive is mountable on my Mac, but it is completely unbootable.

I am at a loss to find any info on this nor do I have any idea what to try next. I KNOW this worked with the first USB drive last year (with an earlier version of ubuntu). What could possibly have changed?

[wilee-nilee]

So how are you using the startup disc creator on a mac? if you have access to either Linux or MS OS try unetbootin. So you must be using pendrivelinux is this correct?

[trevorbsmith]

So how are you using the startup disc creator on a mac? if you have access to either Linux or MS OS try unetbootin. So you must be using pendrivelinux is this correct?

Negative to all:

I have no access to linux--I have access to a terminal, but only on a machine that has so little space on it, I cannot get the .img file over to it to create any USB disk from it.

I have no access to Windows.

I am using "ubuntu netbook remix":
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook

I am using the instructions here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...n/FromUSBStick
to create the USB drive. It worked perfectly with an earlier version; it does not work at all now.

[C.S.Cameron]

You could try checking te MD5SUM of the remix iso, it might be bad.
You could try installing to USB stick using UNetbootin, (but not on your Mac).

[trevorbsmith]

You could try checking te MD5SUM of the remix iso, it might be bad.
You could try installing to USB stick using UNetbootin, (but not on your Mac).

I have access to a GUI only on my Mac. My linux netbook will not boot to a GUI anymore. I have no access to a Windows machine.

I now have freed up enough space on my linux netbook to move the iso file over to it but I cannot find instructions on how to create a bootable USB drive from a linux terminal.

Help?