I've successfully used unetbootin (unetbootin-windows-608) to create a bootable USB memory stick from the ubuntu-14.04.2-desktop-amd64 iso image. I select USB boot from my bios boot menu and get the menu, select either install Ubuntu or try Ubuntu and then install Ubuntu in the GUI.
At this point I'm clearly doing something wrong. I connect either a 12GB USB memory stick to another port or a 1TB external SATA drive connected via USB to another port and choose the "something else" option (as I don't want to dual boot my PC, rather be able to connect and boot from USB when I want to use Ubuntu.
I partition the 12GB memory stick to 1x 100MB Fat16 (sdd1) and 1x rest Ext4 Journaling (sdd2), choose the Bootloader to go on sdd1 and the installation on sdd2.
I partition the 1TB to 1x 100MB Fat16 (sdd1), 1x 2048MB swap (sdd2) and 1x rest Ext4 Journaling file system (sdd3), choose Bootloader to go on sdd1 and the installation on sdd3.
In both cases the install appears to work fine, but when I reboot, have only either the 12GB memory stick or the 1TB drive connected to a USB port, and choose to boot from USB, it just freezes on a black screen and does nothing. My bios does detect if there's no operating system installed on a USB, tells me and then boots to Windows - in both cases it does not do this, it just freezes on a black screen.
What am I doing wrong here?
I really want to have this working as I'm testing it to be able to install it onto a SD card on something else, but if I can't get it to work in this case, I have no intention of spending about £100 to buy the unit I'm looking at and a SD card and then not being able to get it to work their either. Besides, I want to be able to play with Linux!
I'm working on a Dell Alienware M17xR3 with 16GB memory, a 250GB HDD and 256GB SSD second drive, I have the Windows 10 Insider Preview installed. I'm relatively inexperienced with Linux, but have installed various things before and am usually very good at following instructions and how-to's / web guides.