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recently i have made several bootable USB drives with a variety of linux distributions ranging from Ubuntu to Backtrack using the Unetbootin installer. lately however, the devices created stopped working altogether, and will not boot. i tried using a DVD instead, but it would not boot, and instead showed a black screen saying that it could not find the kernel, and when i typed it in, the computer said the boot kernel is invalid. i don't see how this could be possible, having downloaded the OS from the websites with no tampering whatsoever. When i use a USB drive, the machine just flashes "invalid operating system" or something of the sort (goes away too fast to see). What is going on here?

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    What other USB devices are connected? Have you looked at the settings in the BIOS?
    – skub
    Jan 25, 2012 at 3:21
  • everything is fine in the BIOS, and no other USB devices are connected
    – Jon Valentine
    Jan 25, 2012 at 20:59
  • So, is this a problem with the USB drives or with the computer they're used on?
    – Oliver Salzburg
    May 12, 2012 at 16:41
  • They don't boot in your PC or in any PC?
    – André Chalella
    May 12, 2012 at 16:41
  • @AndréNeves i do not know, only having one elderly pc laptop, the rest of my computers are mac
    – Jon Valentine
    May 12, 2012 at 19:28

2 Answers 2

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This isn't a complete, definite answer, but I know that Unetbootin wasn't able to create valid Live-USB installs for Ubuntu recently (I think around 11.04). That might be continuing into 12.04, and perhaps it could be a more far-reaching bug.

How did you make the DVDs? You might want to try burning them again at a lower speed; sometimes you can get unreported errors during creation.

It might also be a good idea to go to pendrivelinux.com (or use the built-in USB creators of many OSes) or some other site to get an alternative USB-creator.

Maybe you could try updating your BIOS if nothing else seems to work.

UPDATE: Ridiculous that I seem to have missed this, but you have tried MD5 checking, right? The most likely thing is that your files are corrupted.

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Maybe you have changed HDD mode from SATA mode or IDE mode to AHCI ..

This is most common mistake people do .

If not set bios to its defaults and retry.

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