"Well, “kyoshi’s help” just searches your system for boot loaders and then presents you with a menu which lists the various boot loaders that the “kyoshi’s help” can chain load. I my case, my boot-loader was GRUB on ext4. It’s a big kludge though and it’s inconvenient because I had to burn “kiyoshi’s help” to a DVD and then I’d boot off of the DVD and then I’d select the boot-loader for my LInux Mint install, which was in an USB slot, and then my install would be chain-booted successfully
I hope this helps,
jdb2"
Jdb2, thanks for getting back with me. Now it makes more sense. Coincidentally, I’ve done something like that before when I was in a pinch in a slightly different situation. Anyway, given that that was the only other potential solution mentioned here outside of the remove and re-insert trick, I think I’ll give up on this now and just use another drive. It looks like there’s no direct solution, just workarounds like these.
Ed_P, I’ve done a direct install to it in the past and that didn’t solve the problem, either. I really think it was just a flaw in a particular run of these drives from a few years back. I actually spent many hours on it back then thinking I was doing something wrong in the way I was installing Linux to it, and it turns out that it was just a flaw in the thumb drive itself. 
It’s all good, though. Thanks for helping to troubleshoot it.
