@ed_p wrote:
Impressive debugging jdb2.
IMO Rather than hardware issues possible problem areas include USB 3.0 drivers for Unetbootin and Cinnamon, 64-bit drivers for Unetbootin and Cinnamon and Unetbootin and Mint 17.1 Cinnamon 64-bit themselves.
Try using a different boot utility, see if that helps. I like Easy2Boot. Try using Cinnamon 17.1 32-bit version.
You’re welcome 
In “hardware issues,” I didn’t mean to say that the drive is defective per se, but that it is somehow incompatible with the Linux boot process, due to a deviation from the USB 3.0 spec – I have several other USB 3.0 drives which boot this version of Mint just fine.
To this end, I plugged the drive into two systems which were only USB 2.0 capable. I got the same results. I tried enabling and disabling all combination s of “BIOS EHCI Handoff,” “BIOS XHCI Handoff,” “Legacy USB emulation” and “Legacy floppy drive emulation,” all with the same results. Then I tried to boot the drive in a system with native USB 3.0 ports which was configured to use UEFI. This time I got a Grub boot prompt, but the end result was the same : “unable to find live file system” . I then disabled and enabled all combinations of the aforementioned settings, with no success. So, I turned UEFI off – no success. I then disabled USB 3.0 in the BIOS and told it to emulate a USB 2.0 controller – still no success.
I could grab the latest upstream mainline kernel source for Linux Mint 17.1 64-bit, configure the kernel with USB 3.0 support turned off ( #CONFIG_USB_XHCI_HCD ), compile said kernel, and remaster a new Mint live DVD. But, I’ve already wiped the drive I’m RMA-ing and I intend to return it soon, so there’s no point in going through the trouble with this particular drive. If the replacement has the same problems, I’ll do the above.
Regards,
jdb2
