880GM-USB3 v1.x mATX Can't boot from flash.

[tadaensylvermane]

Decided to try some linux distros and everywhere suggests using flash drive instead of burning discs. However my bios cannot see my flash drive, it never shows up anywhere in the lists  in the setup or on the boot list. It can see my 500 gig western digital usb hard drive but not my 2 gig sandisc cruzer.

Is it possibly because my flash drive is to small? Original bios is latest one.

[geekyadz]

Well Ive never heard of a USB stick being too smal to boot from, and neither "you must run this off a USB stick", so if you cant get it working just burn a cd/dvd (depending on size of Linux Distro).

The other question is: what method of getting the ISO into the USB stick are you using? Personally I use unetbootin, which even worked for my USB stick to run Android on a laptop (which I couldnt get it to work with another program I use).

I cant remember the exact option in the BIOS, but there should be an option of adding USB-HDD to boot before the HDD; that sounds like thats what you need to do (and make sure the USB stick is in before turning on the PC)

[Vezina]

This can happen , i have issues with the 890GPA-UD3 to boot from some new linux distroes usb sticks , that worked just fine on the 970A-UD3 or with the Gigabyte FM2 board
Some distroes don t like the usb as live medium.


I would suggest you OpenSuse 12.2 DVD ,the KDE desktop.
The perfect alternative to Windows.
Runs Steam ,movies ,music and so on and seen it better using the hardware resources than Ubuntu with AMD APU-s.

[geekyadz]

So you dont rate Linux Mint then, which is based on Ubuntu?

[Vezina]

I ve seen the hype with Mint tried many versions and flavors.
Installing AMD drivers or even installing some software could kill the install easily.Less robust in my opinion than OpenSuse.

After using Mint ,Ubuntu ,Kubuntu ,Simply Mepis and OpenSuse i came to the conclusion that the real deal is Open Suse 12.2.

Best performer in games on Steam running natively.I am talking about CS:S ,TF2 ,DODS.
Also the AMD video drivers installed smooth by simply executing the package.You also have the ati upgrade stuff for this.
Adding the packman repository makes other multimedia stuff possible.

Of course if there is something interesting in another distro you can very well install 2 distroes
But if you take the time to use Open Suse you will see it as a very good alternative.
Using a wattmetter i have discovered that it manages better the APU also opposed to Ubuntu based stuff.
Maybe the tweaked kernel does it opposed to the generic one in Ubuntu.

[tadaensylvermane]

It's not any specific distro thats the problem. Have tried unetbootin, something from pendrive. Also tried a windows command line thing to manually make the drive and set it as bootable. I don't even get the chance to boot it. My problem is that the bios can't even see the thing for some reason. It can see my 500g usb hard drive just fine but the flash drive isn't anywhere in the boot order options or the boot menu itself. Have tried all of the usb boot options in case it was misreading, still no luck.

I also havn't been able to make it boot a memtest either so I don't think it's a problelm with making it bootable.