4

My machine is an eMachines w3107 (2005 CSM/Legacy BIOS Machine) and I seem to have an issue with booting from USB flash drives, even with the proper partition table. I have had this issue many times on other computers and it ended up being because of an invalid partition table.

This problem is different. The USB flash drive isn't showing up as a bootable removable device in my boot device options. I have tried everything I could find online to overcome this issue.

When I force the computer to boot from removable media, the computer hangs with a blinking underscore. As far as I can tell, I can only do Ctrl+Alt+Delete to reboot.

Any help on this problem? Without a UEFI enabled BIOS, no help is currently available elsewhere.

3 Answers3

1

Plop Linux to the rescue!

That'll add a lot of life to legacy machines whose BIOS can't handle booting from a USB. It's easiest if you can burn it to a CD or DVD and boot Plop from that. That will allow you to redirect to your USB device. If you don't have a CD, there are other ways, including using a floppy or, if you have an OS installed on a bootable drive, adding an entry for Plop to your boot manager. You can also just install another hard drive (or use a new partition on an existing drive) and install Plop to there. Any of those will allow you to boot Plop and then redirect to the USB device.

Check out youtube for videos like this one.

Diagon
  • 744
1

Turns out certain file-system setups make this desktop detect the flash drive as a hard drive.
So pretty much it wasn't detected as a removable device, and instead a hard drive by the BIOS. Perfectly able to boot into installation media now by taking the different boot device path no problem.

Screenshot NO.1 Screenshot NO.2

0

I also had a blinking cursor, when I followed the instruction from https://askubuntu.com/questions/372607/how-to-create-a-bootable-ubuntu-usb-flash-drive-from-terminal. Then I used /dev/sdc and not /dev/sdc <?> to created the bootable usb, as suggested in an edit note, and then it worked.

Friedrich -- Слава Україні
  • 119
  • 5