Cannot boot from any Live USB.

[Doruletz]

Hi.
Just built a custom PC with the new 8core "Bulldozer" (AMD FX-8120 Zambezi 3.1GHz Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core Desktop Processor) and a GIGABYTE GA-970A-D3 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard and 16GB G.Skill DDR3 1600 RAM
I cannot boot from any Live USB (I tried Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10, 11.04, 11.10, Linux Mint9, Mint10, Mint11, Mint12, both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions). It either says Boot Error or just sits there doing nothing...
Computer boots fine from a Windows7 Install USB I made, but will not boot from any kind of Linux Live USB (even tried Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora16).
It will however boot fine from any 32- bit or 64-bit Live CD or DVD (disk).
WEIRD, to say the least...
If anybody have any ideas on why it won't boot Live USB and how to make it work, I would be grateful.
Thanks for any help.

Links for parts:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... %20USB%203
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... %20fx-8120
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820231314

P.S. - The PC BIOS does recognise the USB, and is capable of booting from a USB stick, since the Windows7 Install USB boots and installs fine (Not that I will ever wanna use Window$ again, I'm just saying it works)

I DO NOT NOT USE WINDOW$ at all. None of my PC's or laptops have Window$ any more. Window$ sucks...
I tried preparing the Live USB's both with Unetbootin and with Startup Disk Creator (in Ubuntu, Linux Mint 9 and 10). I even tried using a USB prepared with MultiSystem, nothing works.
I have a mind to send the Motherboard back to Newegg and buy another one...

All of the above Live USB work just fine in my other PC (Intel Core i5-2500K, GIGABYTE GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard and 16GB G.Skill DDR3 1600 RAM) and in my older HP Pavilion m8150n PC and my 2 Acer Laptops.

For some reason they don't wanna work in my new Bulldozer PC.
I'm an Intel guy, just got curios by all the talk about the new Bulldozer, starting to regret it now... Should've just stayed with Intel....

Please help. Thanks.

[xenopeek]

Yep, weird... But just to be clear, you are able to boot from the Live CD/DVD, so why do you want to boot from a USB? I mean, other than saving on burning a CD/DVD, why specifically do you want to boot from USB? Okay, call me nosy

With you not having Windows on your computers, I'd imagine you would just install your preferred Linux from Live CD/DVD and if you want to experiment with other distros either go the VirtualBox route (hey, you have to use to 16 GiBs for something, right? That is what I use it for ) or if you want to run them on your actual hardware you can also boot .iso files directly from Grub, or install Plop boot manager to be able to boot to USB from Grub.

Back to resolving the problem of it not booting from USB, do the USBs you made actually boot on your other computer?

[mank_in]

Sometime format USB stick with FAT32 file system helps. Maybe you can try that, or try booting from USB 2.0 port

[dctootall]

From doing a search around the web after running into similar issues installing from a USB drive last night, It appears the problems with booting from a USB are a known and common issue with Gigabyte Motherboards. There are several posts around the web with various work arounds and tricks people have discovered to try and get it to work.

the common suggestions which appear to have a high success rate include using a Windows only HP tool to format the drive with FAT32 since apparently Windows doesn't format the USB drives properly so that the boards recognize them prior to any drivers being loaded.

After several hours of playing around with it last night, I finally got my Gigabyte board to recognize my Install USB, but it would flake out before I could kick off the install. (It acted like it just "lost" the USB stick.) The trick that worked for me was to use the HP tool to reformat the drive, followed by Pendrivelinux to install the DVD ISO to the drive. (thankfully I have a work Laptop with XP on it, so I had a Windows box to work off of). Then I'd have to power off the new machine, plug the USB in, and then power it up. When I went into the boot menu the flash drive would show up under the HARD DRIVES submenu as USB-HDD and would boot successfully to the ISO's desktop. Unfortunately I'd then end up losing the USB drive connection after another minute.

[Doruletz]

From doing a search around the web after running into similar issues installing from a USB drive last night, It appears the problems with booting from a USB are a known and common issue with Gigabyte Motherboards. There are several posts around the web with various work arounds and tricks people have discovered to try and get it to work.

the common suggestions which appear to have a high success rate include using a Windows only HP tool to format the drive with FAT32 since apparently Windows doesn't format the USB drives properly so that the boards recognize them prior to any drivers being loaded.

After several hours of playing around with it last night, I finally got my Gigabyte board to recognize my Install USB, but it would flake out before I could kick off the install. (It acted like it just "lost" the USB stick.) The trick that worked for me was to use the HP tool to reformat the drive, followed by Pendrivelinux to install the DVD ISO to the drive. (thankfully I have a work Laptop with XP on it, so I had a Windows box to work off of). Then I'd have to power off the new machine, plug the USB in, and then power it up. When I went into the boot menu the flash drive would show up under the HARD DRIVES submenu as USB-HDD and would boot successfully to the ISO's desktop. Unfortunately I'd then end up losing the USB drive connection after another minute.

I sold that crap GIGABYTE on fleaby and got me an ASRock Fatal1ty Professional 990FX, problem solved...

[xenopeek]

ASRock rocks

[korr]

*BUMP!*

I had the same problem on my Core 2 Duo + ASUS Board.
LinuxMint 12 on USB drive (FAT32) give's me "Boot Error" and a blank screen.

The system booted successively from the same USB Drive with OpenSUSE 12.1, LinuxMint 8, LinuxMint 11 & LinuxMint 12 Live CD 32 Bit (NOT DVD). So, I think it's not the board's fault, but more of the latest build's fault.

[xenopeek]

Linux Mint 13 should hopefully have a RC next month, and have a final release few weeks after. I'd suggest to retry with that? This seems like a hard issue to pin down, and I don't think a new DVD image for Linux Mint 12 is likely to happen with Linux Mint 13 already at the front door.

[Doruletz]

Solved, all I had to do is use the nomodeset and it worked.

[RytronII]

Another tip I found is to have no spaces in the file name. e.g. I could not boot on MultiSystem from this:
Linux Mint Debian 201303 MATE 32-bit.iso
but could from this:
Linux_Mint_Debian_201303_MATE_32-bit.iso

[arkmabat]

Use the plop bootmanager to boot form usb: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html Just burn it to a cd, boot it, select usb, and it bypasses to the usb, no matter if bios supports usb booting or not.