Ubuntu installation USB stick not detected on boot

[bearl2]

Hello all,

I'm trying to make a USB stick from which I can run a live Ubuntu 12.04 desktop without installing. I believe the process for this is the same as any normal installation, only I click 'try ubuntu' instead of 'install.' I am currently running Ubuntu 12.10. To do this, I followed the following instructions: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-ubuntu

My problem now is that, upon startup, the USB stick isn't recognized and I thus cannot boot from it. I've tried on both a Thinkpad t60 and a Thinkpad e420 with the same results. I have used this same usb stick to install ubuntu before (I've wiped it since), and the usb stick works perfectly otherwise, so I don't think it's a problem with that. I have tried going to the BIOS and changing the boot order, but to no avail.

Does anyone see what I'm doing wrong? Thanks so much!

Edit: Whoops, it turned I had changed the formatting on my usb stick a while back. I reformatted it to fat32 and everything works fine. Silly mistake; sorry for wasting your time.

[SweetAurora]

The startup disk creator has been creating havoc lately. Instead use DD. It's a program that clones drives and writes iso's.
First open the Gnome Disk Utility, might be just "Disks" and see where the usb is mounted, like "/dev/sdX"
Then open the terminal and type:

sudo dd if=/path/to/iso/file.iso of=/dev/sdX
Wait till it finishes before closing the terminal.

DD is more reliable than the program that comes with Ubuntu. Be aware, if used wrong, it can wreak havoc on your system. DD is sometimes called "Disk Destroyer" because it will happily write the ISO over your main drives if you set the paths wrong.

[VMC]

You may be suffering from the bug report I filed. What's the kernel number uname -r.

Open up a terminal and monitor syslog:

tail -f /var/log/syslog

After you start monitoring then plug in the USB device and watch. Wait 5 minutes, it may get mounted.

[ubfan1]

Are you at a black screen with a flashing cursor? Do any error messages eventually appear (after a few minutes)? Saw an installation complaint about missing media /dev/sdb ... which should have been the usb stick. Took drastic action of yanking stick, and replacing, which fixed the issue and allowed installation to continue normally. Thought problem was just flakey USB on the laptop getting the install.