pen drive won't boot

[Octavius]

Bought a 16gb Sandisk Cruzer Micro.  Grabbed the latest persistent use ubuntu distro.  I formatted the drive FAT32.  It installed with no problems, and it ran just fine on another machine (complete boot from flash drive). After the loading screen on my main rig, it gives me a strange I/O error message something similar to this:

Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378384
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378385
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378386
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378387
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378388
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378389
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378390
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378391
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378392

Mobo:  MSI K8T Neo FIS2R (eek, 6 years old, I know)

BIOS settings has everything set to allow for USB boots.

Since it works on my laptop, the problem must lie in the main box.  Anyone have a similar problem?  Is this some easy tweakable BIOS setting?

[Denholm]

Is it possible that this is happening because you're attempting to run the flash drive off a USB hub instead of a USB slot connected directly to the motherboard of the system? The only other guess is that there's something wrong with the USB slot(s) of the computer which fails to boot Linux.

[TequilaChaser]

is your USB slot 1.0 or 2.0, that you are plugging it into? could this cause the problem perhaps? does the bios load it as 2.0 capabilities or does windows have to load a driver to make it happen? ( you said ya MB is 6 yrs old......)

[Kermit de frog]

Try using a different USB Slot.

Or

Try rewritting the partition tables and then format it again in FAT32.
Don't use windows to do this as it's not the best software to use for this.

Worth a shot.

[Kermit de frog]

Any luck Oct?

[Octavius]

oops!  Didn't think I was getting any replies, and I don't check the boards much anymore. 

There are no USB hubs; it plugs directly into the mobo.  I used HP's USB disk storage format tool (http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,64963-order,4/description.html) for a FAT32 wipe a few times.  I tried a few variations of persistent OS's like Kubuntu and others, but I get the same result:

133.140196 end_request: I/O error dev Fd0, sector 0

blah blah blah

I haven't found anyone else with similar problems on the same mobo (MSI K8T800 series), so that must be the problem.  Don't think that particular particular model is very common.  I might flash the BIOS.

[BaldEagl]

I had a sort of similar problem recently with a standard internal hard drive.  It was an IDE drive I had in my new machine (XP).  I wiped everything off the drive, formatted it in NTSF, then deleted the drive and all of the partitions returning it to basic.  Then I created new partitions without formatting them because it was a 200 Gb drive that I was going to use as a Win98SE/XP dual boot on my old machine and I had to remain under the 137 Gb Win98 drive limit.

When I put it in the old machine and began to install Win98 on the first partition it said that there were errors near the end of the drive and it wouldn't install 98.

I then re-partitioned it again using fdisc and formatted all partitions to Fat32 and Win98 and XP both installed without a hitch.

Not sure if this is in any way related but you might want to try formatting it using a DOS program.

[Kermit de frog]

I still think his partition table is not liked by whatever is trying to read it.

[straffo]

hit F6 during boot and add the "irqpoll" flag

so says the linux guru near me

[bustr]

If you can, get a 1G flash drive and try that. My ASUS P5Q Pro handbook made the interesting note that I would not be able to boot it from a flash drive larger than 1G.

Just throwing that out there.