1. Mount the flash drive and delete everything on it.
2. Unmount the flash drive but leave it plugged in.
3. Determine the device name of your flash drive. It may be sdb1.
4. Open a terminal and type:
Code: Select all
syslinux /dev/sdXY
5. Mount the flash drive. You should see the file ldlinux.sys on it.
6. Click on the distro's ISO file to mount it. Copy everything off the ISO onto the flash drive. There may be some hidden files, so use the ROX eyeball icon to see them.
7. Does the ISO contain a folder named isolinux? It may be inside another folder named boot. If so, copy all the files in the isolinux folder to the root of the flash drive.
8. You should now see a file named isolinux.cfg at the root of the flash drive. Rename it to syslinux.cfg.
9. If you cannot find an isolinux.cfg file anywhere in the ISO, it may be using a different bootloader. In that case, your best bet is to manually create a file named syslinux.cfg with the following line
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default /boot/vmlinuz initrd=/boot/initrd.gz vga=normal
If it won't boot, here are some trouble-shooting questions.
Do you know for sure that your machine supports USB bootability? Many older machines (and some newer ones) don't. The best scenario is where the BIOS detects the flash drive as a secondary hard drive.
Have you modified your BIOS boot priority list to enable USB booting?
Have you set the boot flag on the flash drive partition? Check this with Gparted.
Does the MBR of your flash drive contain the standard DOS/WIn boot code? If not, you can manually update the code as follows:
1. Locate the file mbr.bin in the folder /usr/lib/syslinux.
2. Write this file onto the MBR of your flash drive using a command like:
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dd if=mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb