Building first computer....need help

[kurt18947]

I made a boot drive with a new usb drive (got a few SanDisk drives on the cheap) and it worked fine. The filesystem was "W95 FAT32", or some rearrangement of those characters. I'm writing this post from a crunchbang live session off that usb drive.

So, yes it would seem that some GA MBs only like to boot from usb drives formatted by/for windows.

That is how it seems. A liveUSB stick formatted with Ubuntu's disk utility and written with Unetbootin will boot perfectly on an older gigabyte MB or a Thinkpad notebook. The same liveUSB stick will not boot on a rig with a newer gigabyte MB with an Award modular BIOS. It will show a message like "boot error" or similar. Reformat in windows 7, rewrite the live USB with Unetbootin and it boots fine. I'd read someplace that the boot module of that BIOS was written by Microsoft. I would not be surprised to learn that any "improvements" are undocumented.