Laptop will boot to some usb flash drives but not others.

Posted by evolvd on Super User See other posts from Super User or by evolvd
Published on 2010-08-22T00:24:53Z Indexed on 2011/01/05 16:56 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 226

Filed under:

laptop

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usb

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flash-drive

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bootloader

Laptop: HP Compaq 6710b

I can boot from usb just fine with the following usb flash drives:

Cruzer micro 4GB
HP 4GB

The flash drive that will not boot:

Flash Voyager 8GB

To knock out variables I did the following:

Using Hard Disk Low Level Format Tool I performed a low level format
Full erase with Flash Memory Tookit
In windows 7 I formated the drive to fat32
Used USB-Boot-Tester to write to the drive
Also used uNetbooting with various distros to see if that would make a difference

My guesses on what could be preventing the drive from booting:

The laptop does not support booting to usb flash drives larger than 4GB
The drive is defective in some way

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