I am trying to get ubuntu to work from a usb hard drive i have installed it normally and using unetbootin neither have worked the same thing happens i boot the usb and it comes up with a black screen and a blinking cursor at the top left.

I dont know if this could effect anything but im trying to save whats on the disk by making ubuntu be on another partition ive heard of it working but i dont know.

Anything would help.

-WickedShadow

First you need to see if your bios supports it.

It does.

A lot of things could be going on.

One is the actual boot order. It usually is a hard drive selection not a usb selection.

Another is the actual usb flash. Most newer ones can be made bootable with unebootin and others but some are difficult while others simply can not be made bootable.

Another is running part of the program as admin. While you may be able to run unetbootin as a standard user the syslinux command has to be run as admin. Use an admin or run as for the program.

Another is that some versions of these install apps are not up to date. Which version of unetbootin did you use and which version of ubuntu?

Try flash on other computers and try other installer apps and maybe even burn a cd (or run Virtual Machine) to test your downloaded iso.

If your hardware supports it, and you loaded os correctly, most likely the boot flags aren't set on usb hd.

Are you sure your ISO is good and not corrupted? Did you install the ISO or the files? either of these will cause problems with loading.

Ummm i am an admin i have used unetbootin and the newest of both. I dont think i have corrupted file. And what are boot flags?

It's the partition you want your hardware to see first, so it doesn't try to read the files you didn't want to delete or store somewhere else.You can check using gparted.

I already use a partition manager EASEUS Partition Manager but what looks interesting about this is that it says it changes whether things are bootable or not ill check it out and get back to you in a couple of minutes.

I found something interesting that i should have the drive as fat32 and i reinstalled it onto the fat32 using unetbootin and something really weird happened when i booted it showed a boxed smiley with a cursor flashing at the top left corner.