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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.

  • My answer [here](https://superuser.com/a/1338681/143000) might help someone with this problem. Has to do with older BIOS vs UEFI. – Shahin Dohan Jul 12 '18 at 17:44
  • Most people installing linux already knows that the linux live cd boot loader does not support GPT partition scheme –  Jul 14 '18 at 00:33

3 Answers3

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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
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  • If you have a hard drive that you can write to, then you can install it in the machine and install plop on there. Then boot from that drive. That would then allow you to redirect to boot off of the USB. – Diagon Jun 11 '16 at 04:33
  • I have no computer in the house that supports IDE except for that one, and I may be able to write to the drive using a recovery CD. The issue is I removed the boot partition in hopes of software to remaster it with the latest features. The boot partition before had Windows XP on it because of how Windows XP handled partitions. –  Jun 11 '16 at 16:55
  • Well, do you have a USB enclosure for that IDE drive? You could use another computer to install Plop to that drive via USB. Then, you could remove the drive and install it in the target computer using the IDE interface. Since it's linux, it'll boot. – Diagon Jun 11 '16 at 21:46
  • Turns out that Plop Boot Manager didn't work for anything, I got it working on a CD-RW. But nothing I want to boot off a USB is supported by Plop (it freezes), such as Lubuntu, Ubuntu, Windows (CSM), Windows (UEFI), ect. Pretty much everything you could think of doesn't work for me. –  Jun 12 '16 at 16:11
  • Well that's definitely weird. It's never failed for me - and I do use old equipment. How did you make those USB's? What happens when you burn a CD with ubuntu or the like and just boot from that? – Diagon Jun 13 '16 at 19:37
  • (1) You can use that Live Ubuntu USB to boot another machine? (2) Just to confirm it's not a hardware problem, your mouse or keyboard works in that USB slot? (While very slow, I've booted l/ubuntu off of USB-1's. So you could even try them.) – Diagon Jun 14 '16 at 23:04
  • Okay that isn't related to my question, my CD-R/RW drive is fully operable. My issue is directly related to USB expansion. This is a computer from 2004, it was in 2005 USB ports were fully supported for booting. I am wondering if there is a possible way. –  Jun 15 '16 at 01:20
  • I'm trying to troubleshoot here. I don't know why you are having trouble seeing my questions as related. You need to make sure that USB will actually boot (by trying it in another machine). And, that the slot works. If not, try another slot. – Diagon Jun 15 '16 at 21:10
  • Problem solved. Found out the flash drive wasn't showing as a removable device, and instead detected as a hard drive. Hopefully this will help some people now. –  Jan 09 '17 at 15:39
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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

  • So the problem wasn't that you tried to boot from it and failed, it was that you wanted to set the boot order or select it as the boot device and it was hiding as a hard drive rather than being listed as a removable device? Sneaky little devil! – fixer1234 Jan 09 '17 at 21:59
  • @fixer1234 Yeah I tried to edit my original question accordingly, I just don't want to change too much about the question either. –  Jan 09 '17 at 23:08
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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
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