In an attempt to restore usefulness to an abandoned i3 equipped uefi supporting outfit with an "old" sata ii drive but no DVD h/w, I grabbed a sandisk USB thumb drive (4GB capacity) and using Unetbootin which resides on my Ubuntu 12.04 desktop, I set up the usb drive with the latest Fedora 20 iso , KDE flavored live image. anaconda wouldn't find the drive, though I could see it in Dev as sda. The message it gave was to partition and try again. Thus began a series of iso transfers onto the thumb drive: system rescue CD was the first to go on, but I was getting "old kernel" error messages wen trying to do memory tests, so I figured I'd put gparted live on there instead. Not happy with how cluttered the USB drive had become, I trashed its contents then installed gparted live using unetbootin. At this point, unetbootin was finding some of the previously installed and subsequently trashed files, so I nuked the USB drive with DD and wrote /dev/zero to the whole drive. I used gparted to partition and format the USB drive (fat32, then when that wouldn't work, fat16), and tried installing iso's for gparted live, system rescue CD (the last iso that worked), and my trusty, never fails, Debian 7 net install with binaries, but the results have been the same: I get two or three empty lines, and an unresponsive cursor when I boot from the USB drive. Have I exhausted the USB drive (its a flash drive that is about two years old, although very lightly used)? How can I test that drive? Gparted tells me its fine, but I'm suspicious that some part of the boot sector or other critical start of drive location is corrupted. Any advice? -- Sent from my hand held. Please excuse any typing mistakes as these can be hard to correct on this thing. Errors in logic or common sense are entirely my own.