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.