My USB bootable thumb drive, no longer boots on a single particular computer on which it previously worked
- by LiamMeron
I created a bootable drive, booting CrunchBang, about 2 months ago. About a month ago, I booted into it on another laptop. After shutting down, I have been unable to get it to boot on my own laptop, despite having worked previously. I can still boot into it on my desktop, and can also boot into it on all other computers that I have tried.
If I plug it in when I am running Ubuntu, the Home and / folders mount, the only error being that for some reason my PC likes to try and mount the swap partition too, which naturally, gives an error.
The BIOS settings are all still setup to boot from USB. When I boot, all I get is a black screen with the white cursor, it will stay there for as long as I leave it.
If it is worth anything, I have GRUB loader installed on the drive. The partitions look a little odd, but I am rather unfamiliar with how they are dealt with.
The first partition, /, is sdb1 and has the bootable flag.
The second partition is an extended system, and is sdb2.
The third partition, according to GParted, seems to be nested under the second. This is the swap partition, and it is sdb5
The fourth partition is my home partition and is sdb6 and is also nested under the extended system.
The first and fourth partitions are ext4.
I don't know if that helps, but the more info, the better accuracy, generally.
Thanks.
EDIT: I tried reinstalling GRUB on the drive, but that didn't work. However, when I reinstalled GRUB on my laptop, I did it with my USB thumbdrive in. This caused the GRUB updater to find the /boot folder and add the proper details into my laptop's GRUB loader. I could log into CrunchBang from my laptop's GRUB but I was still unable to boot directly to the drive. It looked like my BIOS is unable to find the bootloader. I am unable to install GRUB to a partition I just created, a /boot partition at the start of the drive, GRUB just doesn't allow it. I think I'm going to have to reinstall #! on my drive, which won't be a great loss as I haven't put much time into it.