I am having some trouble making a USB stick bootable, and would welcome some advise

 

The stick is a Sandisk Cruzer Blade 2GB

 

So far I have:-

 

Run U3 removal tool to make it a mass storage drive and remove hidden partition

Formated using HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool using volume name of UNRAID and FAT32, I have also tried formatting via windows explorer too

Copied 5beta14 and expanded 5b14 onto it

Run make bootable batch file, using right click and running as administrator

 

Despite this, I cannot boot from it

 

I have set the BIOS settings for USB drives as 1) Auto 2) Forced HDD and 3) Hard Disk all with no luck

 

I have tried that above proceedure with another USB stick, with the same results

 

 

I am having some trouble making a USB stick bootable, and would welcome some advise

 

The stick is a Sandisk Cruzer Blade 2GB

 

So far I have:-

 

Run U3 removal tool to make it a mass storage drive and remove hidden partition

Formated using HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool using volume name of UNRAID and FAT32, I have also tried formatting via windows explorer too

Copied 5beta14 and expanded 5b14 onto it

Run make bootable batch file, using right click and running as administrator

 

Despite this, I cannot boot from it

 

I have set the BIOS settings for USB drives as 1) Auto 2) Forced HDD and 3) Hard Disk all with no luck

 

I have tried that above proceedure with another USB stick, with the same results

 

 

maybe test teh flash on another pc to rule out the flash being the problem?

 

otherwise - i had some boards giving me a bit of crap - solution was to go into the hard drive boot priority and select the flash from there ( ie power on pc with flash already connected, go into bios, boot settings, set HDD as primary, and then inside the hard drive list make the flash the highest priority.

 

I have now tried both sticks in another PC, and both do not boot

When you expanded the files, did you expand it to the root of the flash or to a folder?

 

it should be to the root keeping the file structure.

 

I usually expand the in the downloads folder (or just double click it so in opens) and copy the files as a group to the flash.

Files were expanded to root

On my motherboard I had to format the flash drive as FAT and not FAT32, as (for whatever reason) the system refused to boot from a FAT32 drive.  I confirmed this with a couple other FAT32 USB drives I boot from for PC recovery that I know work. 

 

I believe the HP utility allows you to format the drive as FAT.

the make_bootable.bat file has a section that reads as follows:

 

echo %~d0\syslinux -ma %~d0

pause

%~d0\syslinux -ma %~d0

 

 

try changing where it says -ma to -maf 

 

I had to do this with my stick as it wasn't seen as a removable device by windows7. adding "f" forces it to think its removable.

Thank you I'll change the make bootable file and will report back. In response to the earlier poster, I have tried formatting in both FAT and FAT32

Do you get any error-message? Can you see the stick in the boot order part of the BIOS? It should be listed as first drive.

The motherboard does see the USB stick, and the stick is shown in the boot devices

 

I have tried changing where it says -ma to -maf the make bootable file, and both FAT and FAT32 formats

 

In BIOS I have tried Floppy, Forced FDD and Hard Drive. In all cases I have set the stick to be the first and only bootable drive

 

However no luck, on booting after the BIOS screen, I get a black screen for 4 seconds, and then get throw back to the BIOS set up