USB booting :: USB drive not recognised ?

USB Booting Blues?

Some drives are not even recognised by the motherboard let alone
booting into DSL.

I've been testing out the latest GParted Live CD partition editor.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
And I must say I'm most impressed.

Linux based, Easy to use, Free, but most importantly;
Compared to other partition utilities I've used, it has the highest success rate of making my usb pens, flash-drives, storage-cards, gadgets and wot-not - recognised by the various motherboards at home or work.

One of the problems with using various utilities is that they don't like each other; e.g mkdosfs can sometimes render a partition initialised with sfdisk to be unrecogised.

You can't have user defined geometry with GParted, but it does initialise with geometry-friendly values. It also formats to dos, allows multiple partitions (better to seperate the knoppix image) and sizing, resizing is graphical.

You will ofcourse have to follow this with a syslinux or freedos bootloader depending on your setup, but at least you would have got over the first stumbling block.

/tip
Just make sure to initialise ('make-label') and ensure there are zero bytes before the first partition.

original here.