Can't get my flash drives to boot

danman486

Distinguished
Mar 17, 2009
2
0
18,510
A couple months back I had my sandisk cruzer 16 gb & 4 gb titanium booting into BartPE and separately various flavors of linux. Now I can't get anything booting... tried on 2 computers (the same ones that were running fine before), both flash drives. The computers either say boot error or just hang with the flash drive light blinking. I must have remade boot disks 20 times using the batch files & isos from pendrivelinux.com and unetbootin-windows-319.exe. Reformatted the 4gb drive to FAT, FAT32... changed the allocation sizes. I can't figure anything out. Thanks in advance!
 

montyuk

Distinguished
Oct 22, 2008
708
0
19,010
could try looking up how to create a windows 7 boot usb, specifically the section on doing bootsect /nt60 (search for that on google).

although im surprised your having these issues when your already using unetbootin.
 

danman486

Distinguished
Mar 17, 2009
2
0
18,510
all fixed! I ran the "low level format tool" http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2006.04.12-HDD-Low-Level-Format-Tool/ which wipes out your MBR and then some.... since I'm not very experienced in boot sectors its been a nice gui experience. I guess somehow the MBR on both flash drives got screwed up. Hopefully this helps someone else. Thanks for the reply montyuk!