Won't boot from USB

almoststew1990 · 25 Oct 2018 at 21:54

I picked up a second hand netbook today. I want to put a fresh XP install on it but it won't boot from USB. I am using Rufus to make a bootable using a disk image of XP I made. I insert the USB stick, it is detected by the bios (the brand and capacity and everything), I set it as first to boot but when it tries to boot it does nothing for 20 seconds and the moves onto the SSD.

I have been hammering the keys incase it is saying "press any key to boot from cd..." but i just can't see it, but nothing happened

Any ideas?

almoststew1990 · 25 Oct 2018 at 22:16

Yeah they're both working fine. I drive I put in the netbook had an old install of Windows 7 on it and that picks up the USB sticks fine.

almoststew1990 · 25 Oct 2018 at 22:38

Yeah, it'll boot to the SSD that is in there. It just won't boot to USB. When I tell it boot to USB, it shows a black screen with the flashing underscore, and the the underscore moves down a line or two and the SSD kicks in

almoststew1990 · 25 Oct 2018 at 22:52

Hi it won't boot from my Haswell pc. If I tell it to boot from UEFI: General UDisk as a boot override from within the bios, the screen flicks black but then comes back to the Bios. If I tell it to boot to just "General UDisk" I get the same flashing underscore.

almoststew1990 · 25 Oct 2018 at 22:54

Rufus running with an "MBR" partition with a target system of "Bios (or UEFI-CSM)".

MagicBoy said:
Yeah, it's not bootable then. Try recreating it.

OK i need to find my other other other USB stick

almoststew1990 · 26 Oct 2018 at 17:51

I nabbed a USB stick from work and used Win 2 flash instead of rufus or Win32img and it worked! No idea what it did different but nowI can finally do a fresh install.

Thanks for the help