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A few days ago, I installed Arch Linux alongside Windows 8 on a new Dell laptop. I did so by booting from a USB drive, and there were no problems with the install. I'm now trying to install CrunchBang alongside Arch and Windows, but I'm not able to boot from a USB drive. The option to boot from USB has disappeared from the BIOS, and I haven't been able to find any way to re-enable it. I've tried every option I can find, to no avail.

I've also looked into booting from the USB from GRUB, but I haven't had any success there; executing ls from the GRUB command line with the USB drive connected just shows my hard drive's partitions.

I'm using EFI and GPT, and everything else seems to be working properly. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I'd be happy to provide any information that would help to diagnose the problem.

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  • Does EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI exist within the usb stick you're using? And is not crunchbang just a variant of archlinux?
    – hanetzer
    Jun 27, 2014 at 0:06
  • Aha, that's it -- turns out the drive isn't EFI-bootable. I guess that's the first thing I should have checked. If you post your comment as an answer, I'd gladly accept it. CrunchBang is Debian-based, by the way.
    – Ben
    Jun 27, 2014 at 0:24
  • Ah, I think there is an arch variant with a similar name to crunchbang... hrm.
    – hanetzer
    Jun 27, 2014 at 0:42
  • Yes, you must be thinking of ArchBang.
    – Ben
    Jun 27, 2014 at 0:54
  • Ah, yeah that must be it.
    – hanetzer
    Jun 27, 2014 at 1:15

1 Answer 1

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Does EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI exist within the usb stick you're using? I find the best way to make EFI bootable usb disks is to format it to fat32, extract the iso to the root of the drive, then setup EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI in the proper manner. The exact specifics may differ from distro to distro, though.

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