Thanks ardvark.

I don't know. That looks pretty over my head and a privacy risk.

At least, it seems other people are having the same problem. (Misery loves company?)

New info. (Am I INCHING closer?) I put Xubuntu 14.04 "live" on a USB flash drive via Unetbootin and put it into the laptop. (I figured the laptop had Xubuntu on it before so maybe it would like it.) So I put it in and hit the power. This time the bar on the splash screen opened really slowly. I thought for sure it was going to work. But I got a new message. (It no longer showed that message about SYSLINUX 6:03 (see screenshot).)

Now it just says:

I was like, Duh.

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"Missing operating system" means that there is not exactly one partition marked "active" in the partition table. Fix that with fdisk.

Rk, This sounds very promising. But I am not a techie and don't know how to fix anything with fdisk. And Googling around about fdisk and how to use it it seemed I had to get into the terminal of the target laptop and as far as I can tell I can't. (We are talking the partition on the target laptop, right?) Anyway, long story short, could you tell me how to do this fixing? Thanks.

You don't do that from the broken machine. Do it from a working one. On some working Linux machine, run "sudo fdisk /dev/sdX", replacing "X" with the appropriate drive letter. Here:Note the asterisk that was originally missing in the "Boot" column.

Thanks a lot, rk. I need just a little more fleshing out. So the problem is the USB drive?

And as to your instructions. So I put the USB flash drive I'm going to use for the install into a working Linux computer, right? Then should that USB drive be empty or have the distro I'm going to install on it? Is FAT32 okay for the formatting? Then (see screenshot) am I running:

or

?

Then once I enter the command, I'm adding the red letter or number at the called-for stage, right? And yeah, then the asterisk signifies that the USB drive is bootable.

Sorry for the overkill request for clarification. But I especially wasn't sure about what the appropriate drive letter would be.

And just wondering: was there a reason for needing to do this in terms of something being wrong with the USB drive?

Thanks a lot!

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You are adjusting the partition table. Drives (/dev/sdb) have partition tables. Individual partitions (/dev/sdb1) do not.

Yes, I used red color for the part you need to type, but since you are using gparted you can do the same thing there. Just right-click on the partition, select "Manage Flags" from the menu, and add a check mark for "boot".

There is nothing "wrong" with the drive. The partition was just never flagged as bootable, and that is confirmed by the empty "Flags" column in the screenshot you posted.

Thanks rk. Okay, I did what you said. The "boot" showed up in the flag area. I put the USB flash drive into the laptop. (Making sure USB DEVICE was the first entry on page 2 of the BIOS.) And ran it and it gave me the second to last error message again (see screenshot) Then I powered the laptop on and chose F12. The boot menu came up and I chose the USB Device choice and the same error (as in the screenshot) came up again.\

rk, I THINK the error is due to that I had that Puppy Linux on that USB flash drive. I will put something else on the flash drive, try again and report back.

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You are not, by any chance, trying to boot a 64-bit OS on that 32-bit CPU, are you?

No. Even so, I can't help but feel like I'm doing something wrong. I've installed four or five Linux OSs on Windows computers and never had any trouble.

Now I just tried to install Xubuntu 14.04 (via Unetbootin, making sure it said "boot") on a Linux computer and I got the same message as in the last screen shot. (So the Puppy install wasn't the problem.)

I can't imagine what your problem might be. I just used unetbootin (version 613, Linux64) to download Xubuntu 14.04 and put it on a USB flash drive. That drive boots just fine on several different systems.

I don't know. I think I'm getting close, though. (Thanks for hanging with me on this. )

Progress! It's still a little mysterious but I'm edging closer, even had some success. A part of the problem is my really old hardware. I saw this link https://askubuntu.com/questions/6967...ive-with-15-10 saying you can't make 15.10 stuff with 15.04 or older distros via usb creator (this was the error I assume I was getting because of that.) (But I wasn't using usb creator to make the bootable usb drives and CDs. I used either Unetbootin, Startup Disk Creator or K3b (for the CDs).

And with a couple of the machines I used to be able to install OSs with a USB flash drive I am no longer able to (this is part of the still-existing mystery), however I was able to boot a distro (in this case Bodhi) to one of those machines with a CD. AND I was able to boot Bodhi to the laptop with a CD.

The limitations are that the CD will only hold the smaller distros, so if I wanted to boot say, Lubuntu (at 783MB) it's too big for the 700 MB CD.

There's this workaround using something called PLoP but I don't know about that.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16822...-wont-let-you/

My next big challenge (besides those above) will be a Dell Optiplex GX520 running Windows 7 totally went down at where I work and I inherited it. It'll be faster than the old clunker I normally use and I would love to install Xubuntu 15.10 on it. So we'll see. The GX520 is 64bit (which is one of the reason I would really LOVE to get it to work with Xubuntu (which is my fav distro).) And so (see screenshot) would this be the file I would be choosing to make the bootable usb drive? Thanks.

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Gregg,

We have all got our fingers and toes crossed for you this time with the GX 520!

From the specs I see, the Dell Optiplex GX520 has an Intel Celeron D processor, which is a 32-bit CPU. You'll need a 32-bit OS for that, so choose the xubuntu-15.10-desktop-i386.iso file, not the amd64 version.