BIOS boot errors

I wanted to install Xubuntu 13.10 on a desktop PC (Asus EeeTop ET2002) and took a while until I got a booting USB stick (flash drive).

At first I tried unetbootin, which always gave me bootable USB sticks from ISO files. This time it did not - the BIOS only told me:

boot error

I tried to flash the stick using usb-creator-gtk, but it only gave me a nearly identical error:

load error - boot error

Next I skipped the tools at all and copied the iso directly onto the USB stick:

$ dd if=/path/to/livecd.iso of=/dev/sdc

Booting the stick now gave me:

isolinux: image checksum error, sorry...

I filled the whole drive with zeros and then copied the iso with a block size of 4k:

$ cat /dev/zero > /dev/sdc
$ dd if=/path/to/livecd.iso bs=4096 of=/dev/sdc

The block size helped. The zeros did probably not help in any way.

Now I got further and actually saw the live USB menu, but filled with the following messages:

invalid or corrupt kernel image

No Texts!

casper/vmlinuz: file not found

I had tried the amd64 version of the Xubuntu ISO, because Wikipedia told me that the Intel Atom 330 supported the ia64 instructions. As fallback, I tried now the i386 version - and that worked.

The solution was to dd the i386 iso file with a block size of 4096 bits directly onto the USB drive.

Written by Christian Weiske.

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