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I tried several times to boot Ubuntu from a USB, because I need to delete some old Windows files after moving Windows from an HDD to an SSD. I used the USB stick to install Ubuntu on my laptop, but that doesn't work on my other computer. When I get to the BIOS menu, I have tried booting from usb-hdd, usb-fdd and usb-zip, but I always end up starting the computer in Windows 7. Does anyone know why it doesn't work?

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  • First of use unetbootin to create live usb. Second, check if legacy usb is turned off, that might help
    – akxer
    Sep 3, 2015 at 20:28

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Different computers have different requirements on bootable usb sticks, most of which make exactly 0 sense. You will be able to boot from a usb stick if you use this command:

sudo dd bs=8M if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdx

To get what to put instead of /dev/sdx, enter df -h when your thumb drive is mounted. You'll see a line like

/dev/sdb1                  30G   30G  706M  98% /media/christoph/Ubuntu 15.04 amd64

For your thumb drive.

The unfortunate thing about this solution is that it's really ugly. It'll destroy all partitions on the thumb drive. After you used it, to get the usb stick back to normal, open GParde, switch to your usb stick, and choose Device → Create Partition Table, then make a partition again.

Note that a lot of computers have a problem with more than 1 partition on a bootable usb stick, so removing additional partitions might be enough and you don't have to revert to this ugly solution.

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