Earlier, I wrote: > > 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. ... > > Any advice? > Just an update on this: Using my desktop, I've tested the usb drive with dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null with no errors reported. badblocks also returns no errors on the usb drive doing a read-only test. the boot flag is "on" on the USB drive according to gparted. Output from fdisk -l is as follows: Disk /dev/sdb: 4012 MB, 4012900352 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 487 cylinders, total 7837696 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000c429a Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 63 7823654 3911796 6 FAT16 I'm going to assume that the reserved 62 blocks at the start of the drive are for MBR deets. The USB drive also has all of the respective files on it that I would expect from a successful unetbootin iso transfer. Sadly, I can't test the drive on my desktop: It doesn't support USB boot. next step: I guess it's going to be: dd if=<path-to->gparted.iso of=/dev/sdb I just don't understand why this was working successfully as a bootable USB drive, and then quit working (except that I went and trashed the entire contents of the drive and then reformatted, but should that really be a problem?) Also to clarify on the original message: I've used ambiguous language to try and differentiate the HDD and USB Drive. The boot with Fedora 20 KDE live was successful off of the USB stick. Anaconda wouldn't recognize the HDD which was on ata1. The HDD is getting power, and such (it's spinning up). The HDD had been formatted EXT4 while mounted in a HDD enclosure, with the boot flag not set. There was only one partition. I'm surprised that Fed20LiveKDE didn't have any kind of disk management utility available to deal with this stuff. I've experienced nothing but grief trying in install Fedora (I tried fed19 on an intel core2quad with built-in nvidia graphics, and that was hands down the worst installation and configuration experience I've ever had). The thing is, I can't even get that trusted debian 7 iso to work. The system just no longer wants to boot from that usb drive.