I recently acquired a ThinkPad X40 with no operating system and am trying to install Ubuntu 11.04 on it from a USB drive. The system has no optical drive, or else I would have tried that. I'm on a Windows machine right now and have been running the Universal USB Installer to format my USB drive and put the Ubuntu i386 image onto the drive.

When booting the X40, I'm hitting F12 to get to the quickboot menu and it's showing the Kingston 8GB Flash Drive in the boot list, so I select it and then it jumps to a screen that says

Missing operating system.
Intel Boot Agent
Intel Boot Agent PXE Base Code
Media test failure, check cable
Exiting Intel Boot Agent
Operating System not found.

So it looks like it's just bypassing the USB device completely and going straight to the network boot.

I figure I must have something set wrong, but I thought the Universal USB Installer was supposed to configure everything for boot?

If anyone could help me out that'd be great. Thanks!

EDIT: I've tried this with Ubuntu, Puppy, and now Linux Mint, so I don't think it's the disc images.

EDIT: Another update. I just tried booting without the USB key and it didn't say "Missing operating system" at the top so I guess it looked in the USB key but didn't see the information? I'm trying to manually make the disc image while on a Mac using the Ubuntu instructions on the download page.

I just installed a couple of weeks ago on a friends ThinkPad X40 from the USB drive.

What I did was (while booting with the USB key plugged in ) to press that long capsule-shaped blue button in order to enter BIOS.

Then I selected something like boot.

Then I navigated to the Hard Drive list and selected to expand.

Then I used either F5 or F6 to move my USB stick to the top of the list.

Save and exit.

Then it booted to the USB stick.

I tried, but it was already set to boot off of the USB HDD by default. Any other suggestions?

Have you tried to boot from that USB in another machine, in order to verify that the .ISO was correctly written to the USB stick.

My only machines are both Apple hardware which I don't know how to choose to boot from USB. Doesn't Apple hardware use GUID instead of MBR for booting?

EDIT: I tried again but made a "Persistent" section of the USB Drive. It says "Boot Error" this time, so to me it's a good sign that it's not necessarily a hardware issue like I first suspected. Perhaps it's a problem with my ISO.

EDIT: One more thing. I've read about some people trying with smaller USB drives. Mine is 8GB, could that cause problems? I'm searching out 1GB drives since I plan on installing Ubuntu which is ~700mb in size.