I’m successfully running Mint Cinnamon 17.1 on my laptop as the only OS, and have successfully installed and run a 17.1 live version from a PNY 2.0 8GB thumb drive using Unetbootin.
But when I successfully install the live version onto a Sandisk 3.0 32GB Ultra Fit thumb drive, using the same method on the same laptop, during the Sandisk Live boot, I get the message (initamfs) “Unable to find a medium containing a live file system”.
After formatting again to FAT32, I’ve tried Linux USB Image Writer and Unetbootin again, each attempt resulted in “unable to find a medium containing a live file system”. Even though the ISO is successfully written to the drive.
I’ve tried booting from different 2.0 USB ports. Same failed results.
GParted shows the Sandisk partition flagged “boot” the same as the PNY drives.
So I then used terminal command: ‘sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=4096’ to completely zero out the SanDisk.
I formatted FAT32 again.
I checked the downloaded ISO MD5 for accuracy.
I used Unetbootin to write the ISO to the USB stick.
With the stick still in the port I restarted and opened the boot menu.
I checked the BIOS boot order. USB HDD: SanDisk-(USB 2.0) was listed first. I selected it.
I got the same failed results: The Linux Mint 10 sec. to boot screen opens, then the screen with the LM logo appears.
After awhile the same message appears:
“BusyBox v1.21.1 (Ubuntu 1:1. 21.0-1ubuntu1) built-in shell(ash)
(initramfs) Unable to find a medium containg a live file system”.
I tried to boot the SanDisk on another laptop with the same failed results.
I used the terminal command to list and include hidden directories “ls -a” and listed:
. casper-rw ldlinux.sys preseed ubninit
… .disk MD5SUMS README.diskdefines ubnkern
boot dists menu.c32 syslinux.cfg ubnpathl.txt
casper isolinux pool ubnfilel.txt
Which is exactly what one of my functional Linux Live PNY sticks lists.
So my last attempt was to clone the functional Linux Live PNY USB stick to the Sandisk USB stick. After formatting FAT32 again I used terminal command:
sudo if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=32M
It cloned perfectly, but again the SanDisk would start to boot with Unetbootin, then “unable to find a medium containing a live file system”.
Is there any way to use SanDisk Ultra Fit 3.0 32GB Flash Drive for a bootable Linux Mint Live OS?