Unetbootin liveUSB stick no longer works after installing Win7? External links Options

[jimrowland]

So I've been running Ubuntu in a VM environment for a while, seeing if I like it. I think it's something I'd like to have as the primary OS on my netbook, so I downloaded the latest Netbook Remix version (9.10). Problem is, I can't get the thing to boot from my USB stick.

Before we get into any lessons on how to set up a USB stick to be bootable, and how to adjust the BIOS's boot priority... let me say that I've used this exact stick and this exact laptop in the past just fine. When my netbook came home from the store with WinXP on it, I created a Live USB using unetbootin v3.56 and made the stick bootable with a gparted-live ISO. I used this to boot from the stick and partition my drive in half so that I could load the Win7 RC onto the other partition. Everything worked great then. I blew away those partitions and went back to a single partition when I loaded up my full Win7 OS a few weeks ago.

I'm wondering if it's possible that Win7 does something special with the bootloader to prevent this stick from being recognized? I know that sounds kinda far fetched, but I have a vague sense of having read this somewhere, but I can't find anything along those lines now.

Just to be sure, I went into the BIOS and took out both the CD and the HDD from the boot sequence, so the only thing in there was the "removable device". I got a "please insert an operating system" type message.

When I started this process, the stick was still in "LiveUSB" mode with the gparted OS - however, I didn't test it to see if it would have booted from it. I just assumed that it would have, since that was the last time I used this USB stick.

Here's what I've tried so far:
+ formatted the stick via the Windows Explorer right-click-format routine.
+ re-ran unetbootin with the Remix.ISO (no joy)
+ re-formatted, downloaded the latest unetbootin version (v3.77), and tried the Remix.ISO again (still nothing)
+ re-formatted, tried using the unetbootin "on board installer" for Ubuntu 9.10 (where it goes out and fetches the image instead of using a .ISO). Still no joy.

Any ideas on where I might be going wrong? Is my idea on the Win7-bootloader-blocking-the-stick idea valid at all? My USB stick /does/ go blinky-blinky a few times when the computer is booting.

I just ran a test to prove that it wasn't the USB stick causing problems... I just booted my wife's desktop from it, and it booted into the LiveUSB environment just fine. The desktop is a new HP system that came loaded with Win7 Home 64bit OEM. So, it's not purely a Windows 7 thing preventing the booting from sitck.

I also tested my laptop's boot priority by using a physical CD, and it booted from CD just fine.

a few more details on the netbook... it is an Asus EeePC 1000HE model with 1G ram. I upgraded from the OEM WinXP to Win7 Home Premium off of a "Family Pack" that we bought to upgrade the wife's and kids' laptops. Figured since we still had 1 license left, I would upgrade mine as well.

I'd still like to dual-boot this with Ubuntu as the primary OS, but I need to get the stick working, so if anyone has any great ideas, I'm all ears. I'd just create a LiveCD, but I'll be damned if I can find any blank CDs just laying around... that's almost as archaic as a floppy these days. Since I don't do a lot of playing, I don't really have a need for blank CDs. :/

This laptop /used to/ boot from the stick back when it had WinXP, but will not boot from the same stick now that I've reloaded the laptop with Win7.

[Wonko the Sane]

Any ideas on where I might be going wrong?

Yes.
http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoynePollar...no-answers.html

Is my idea on the Win7-bootloader-blocking-the-stick idea valid at all?

To put it bluntly, NO.

From what you report you simply have a "botched" MBR or NO partition Active.

How and why this happened is of course unknown.

Use HDhacker (or any similar tool) to extract a copy of the MBR (first sector of the PhysicalDrive), compress it in a .zip and post it as attachment.
http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/



Wonko

[jimrowland]

Yes.

Okay, you got me on that one. :^) I usually try not to be the stupid newbie poster. lol

From what you report you simply have a "botched" MBR or NO partition Active.

I wouldn't be surprised by the botched MBR... I used the Win7 installer to rearrange the partitions and go back to a single partition during the install process. As far as an "active partition", I am assuming that you mean on the usb stick? I did do a DISKPART and ensured that the partition was active on the usb drive. Also, this usb stick booted fine on another system.

Use HDhacker (or any similar tool) to extract a copy of the MBR (first sector of the PhysicalDrive), compress it in a .zip and post it as attachment.

I'm not sure if I did this right... I used HDhacker, selected "Physical Drive (MBR)" with disk0 (only 1 hdd in the netbook), and then clicked "Read sector from disk"... at which point there was some gibberish in the window. From there I clicked "Save sector to file", which created the dat file that I am uploading now.

So now... any ideas? (you can select either yes or no). :^) Or, more speficially: how do I fix my MBR so that I can boot from my USB? Thanks in advance for any answers, smartass or not.

Attached File(s)

 MBR_HardDisk0.zip ( 579bytes ) Number of downloads: 51

 

[Wonko the Sane]

Okay, you got me on that one. :^)

Yep, I tend to get lots of people with this one.

Also, this usb stick booted fine on another system.

This is stranger, but stil it is possible that one stick is "compatible" with one system and it is not on another one, it actually happens all the time, unless the USB devicve MBR has a number of "universal" characteristics.

I'm not sure if I did this right... I used HDhacker, selected "Physical Drive (MBR)" with disk0 (only 1 hdd in the netbook), and then clicked "Read sector from disk"... at which point there was some gibberish in the window. From there I clicked "Save sector to file", which created the dat file that I am uploading now.

Well, you hard disk 0 is your internal hard disk, I meant the MBR of the USB stick, it will be physicalDrive #1 when you connect it to a PC with one internal hard disk.

The Windows 7 (or anything on the internal hard disk) cannot affect the bootability of a USB stick, as it is simply not loaded during boot if "booting from USB" is enabled in the BIOS.
This latter may actually be the culprit, on some BIOSes changing a setting seemingly unrelated with USB booting may prevent from booting from USB (as an example - but usually on desktop - the "legacy keyboard support" has been reported to be cause of grief).

As well some BIOSes that allow the press of a hot-key (usually F11 or F12) while booting to boot from USB may fail booting from USB while setting the "normal" booting order to "USB first, then HD" works.

Try posting the MBR of the USB stick.



Wonko

[jimrowland]

This is stranger, but stil it is possible that one stick is "compatible" with one system and it is not on another one, it actually happens all the time, unless the USB devicve MBR has a number of "universal" characteristics.

Ahhhh... but, as stated in the OP, I used this exact usb drive in this exact laptop to boot into a liveUSB gparted environment. That was back when this laptop was loaded up with the OEM WinXP that it came with, and I wanted to partition and dual-boot the Win7 RC. That all worked great, so this stick is definitely compatible with this laptop. The only thing that changed is that I loaded the full Win7 and that I reformatted the usb stick to use the newer unetbootin app.

Here is the MBR report from the usb drive. I appreciate your continued looking at this. MBRs and active partitions are definitely not my strong suit.

Attached File(s)

 MBR_HardDisk1.zip ( 551bytes ) Number of downloads: 52

 

[Wonko the Sane]

MBRs and active partitions are definitely not my strong suit.

They'll probably become one, after we've finished here.

The MBR you posted has a number of "non-kosher" characteristics.

The partition type is 0B (CHS mapped) and the start is not on a Cylinder/head boundary (given the nowadays default 255/63 H/S geometry with which it is probably detected by BIOS).

A possible solution worth a try is to re-partition it (and obviously later re-formatting it) with the values shown.

The attached screenshot is from my MBRBATCH utility, which I have no idea if it's working on 7.
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=3191

You can use a hex editor (I do recommend TinyHexer with my Structure Viewers)
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=8734

or a partition table editor, like PTEDIT32 or beeblebrox:
http://www.msfn.org/board/removing-grub4do...e-5.html&s=

You will lose ANY data now on the stick so make a backup if there is any good data.

It is also possible that just changing the partition type from 0B to 0C (LBA mapped) solves the booting problem.

All in all I would start from scratch and re-partition/re-format the stick with RMPREPUSB:
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showforum=95

or any of the other "last generation" utilities:
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=9460

Wonko

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[Wonko the Sane]

Post blanked as a retaliation for the deletion of maanu's post.

Wonko

[maanu]

post removed . sorry

[jimrowland]

I appreciate the continued help. I've read your instructional post a good 3 or 4 times, trying to interpret some of it into idiot speak. I don't think you were saying to run all of those utilities, so here's what I've accomplished so far:

All in all I would start from scratch and re-partition/re-format the stick with RMPREPUSB:
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showforum=95

I ran RMPrepUSB, with the attached screenshot showing what my settings were.

I then ran HDHacker against it to see what it looked like, but I don't think it was looking right. (see attached zip, with the "x2" file).

However, I thought maybe that the RMPrepUSB simply prepped the USB back to a "known good" partition. Perhaps I actually needed to load a MBR onto it. (??) So, I ran the unetbootin utility again with the same gparted-live ISO that I started this whole adventure with. Obviously, I'm only guessing here, but I was grasping at straws that maybe this "loads an MBR".

Once unetbootin did it's thing, I ran HDHacker again (see attached zip, with the "x3" file). Neither of the dumps looked "good", but all 3 of them look different from each other, so obviously something is changing. Alas, the stick still does not boot. It also no longer boots my wife's desktop, which it did previously (with the configuration that is shown in the HDHacker dump up a few posts).

Do you have any further suggestions for me to try? Wait, sorry, that's a yes or no question... How about: What's the next step you suggest I take?

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Attached File(s)

 MBR_HardDisk1x2_3.zip ( 1.09K ) Number of downloads: 49

 

[Wonko the Sane]

Both the "x2" and "x3" have identical DATA to the proposed "manual" solution (then it is "right" ).

"x2" uses (I seem to remember - haven't checked properly) 2K/NT/XP MBR CODE.
"x3" uses a "different" MBR CODE, maybe Syslinux? <-since just the CODE changed, it means that Unetbootin is working allrigth, and the problem is somehow in the data.

It is possible that those motherboards require CHS access, ot that however the BIOSes detect them strangely.

Things to try (leave for the moment Unetbootin aside):

Run RMPREPUSB and CLEAN drive. (just to make sure any old thing doesn't get in the way)

Re-run RMPREPUSB, this time (different attempts):

1. Re-run RMPREPUSB, as you did
2. Re-run RMPREPUSB, as you did, then use beeblebrox to change partitin type from 0C to 0B
3. Re-run RMPREPUSB, besides the FAT32 radio button, check also the Boot as HDD (C: 2PTNS) checkbutton
4. Re-run RMPREPUSB, besides the FAT32 radio button, check also the Boot as HDD (C: 2PTNS) AND the Force use of LBA calls checkbutton

Do the above attempts in reverse order, last one should be the "most" compatible.

After each run of RMPREPUSB, disconnect the stick and re-insert it, then add to the root just the appropriate loader (depending on which radio button you select in the OS choice):

• if WinPe2 or 3/Win7->BOOTMGR
• if DOS->IO.SYS
• if Xp/Winpe 1->NTLDR
• if Freedos->kernel .sys

You should be able to boot the loader (which then will throw an error as it won't find the other eneded files, but that's allright, as we are trying to troubleshoot the initial booting phase).

About the "stick does not boot", can you describe what you see when it fails?

Available options :

1. an error message <- which exact one?
2. a blinking cursor/underscore in top left of screen
3. a blinking or static "j" or "g" in top left of screen
4. a completely blank screen

Wonko