USB boot or not?

KimKat7997

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Are some USB drives ( jump drives) just not bootable? If not then I am messing up something somewhere. I just bought a new cheapo USB stick 16 GiB and cannot boot to it no matter what I try. Help me please!
 
What are you creating the bootable drives with (as in what software are you using)?

Sometimes cheap ones have issues yeah - seen some motherboards just not like some flash drives as well (usually the cheaper ones).
 
What are you creating the bootable drives with (as in what software are you using)?

Sometimes cheap ones have issues yeah - seen some motherboards just not like some flash drives as well (usually the cheaper ones).
I was just loading Xenial on it. USB drives are just like floppies used to be, aren't they? Just made of circuits and with the bus as an I/o. Sorry if my terms aren't quite right, I'm halfway asleep ;) no coffee yet! As for price range, while normally I'd aim for quality, I wasn't expecting the need, so just got the cheapest option available. Not normally a move that I make.
 
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I'm not concerned with what you're loading it with, but rather what you're using it load the flash drive. E.g., UNetBootin, Rufus, command line tools, etc.

Quality of the components can affect not only performance, but sometimes behavior as well.
 
Copy and paste ctrl^c and v. Why do I need an application copy files to a drive just to be able to boot to it? My formal computer education has been very spotty, and none recent, is this a new thing?
 
Copy and paste ctrl^c and v. Why do I need an application copy files to a drive just to be able to boot to it? My formal computer education has been very spotty, and none recent, is this a new thing?

Because it doesn't simply copy/paste the files over. It also creates boot file information for you so that the system can actually recognize that the drive is bootable, and where to load info/files from for the boot process.

You should have downloaded an ISO from Ubuntu's website, so you should be able to just use something like Rufus to load the ISO / select your flash drive, and then let it's do it's thing.

Here's a link to the application I'm mentioning: https://rufus.akeo.ie/
 
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