Unetbootin Failing to create bootable drive
 

So i have a Sandisk 5gig USB key that had mint 9 live on it that i was hoping to get an old brotasaurus (Dell Latitude D510) up and running again with. apparently Mint is too pretty for the beast and so I tried to get mint Fluxbox to install on to the key, then i tried Fedora, and finaly i tried DSL. Unetbootin seems to have stoped making the key bootable as three of my laps seem unable to read it. I think this may be because i whiped the key with gparted and got rid of the small little boot partition with out even thinking about....any help would be much apreciated


[Update]
so i tried dd'ing the iso to the usb following the instructions on the suse site
# umount /dev/sdb1
# dd if=/home/Derf/Downloads/dsl-4.4.10.iso of=/dev/sdb1 bs=4M;sync
and it is still failing to create a bootable usb. says

missing operating system

intel UNDI, PXE-2.1(build 082)
copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation

For Realtek RTL8101E/8102E PCI-E Ethernet Controller v1.08 (080408)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM

You mentioned using GParted. Open GParted again, and check if you set the drive's flag to bootable. You may have to reformat with GParted, but hopefully not.

This "dd the disk to the stick"-thing never worked for me. If using Unetbootin make sure to format the partition on the stick with FAT32, currently there seems to be a bug if it is formatted in ext2/3/4.

its defentetly flaged to bootable
checked via fdisk, and gparted and looked at it in disk utility


I've also now tried liveusb-creator (since i am runnin fedora13) and the error it gives me is
Extracting live image to USB device...
Unable to find LiveOS on ISO
LiveUSB creation failed!
Unable to find LiveOS on ISO

Using the "dd" command to make a bootable ISO image on a hard drive device does NOT generally work. The formats of these different storage media differ in how they boot. CD/DVD use the El Torito method which is designed for CD/DVD media using ISO formats. A hard drive device uses an MBR or GPT partition table. Typically the booting starts with sector 0 as the 1st stage for a hard drive.

A USB memory stick is almost always emulating a hard drive.

There has been some BIOS mods to make the BIOS detect an ISO image on a hard drive, and engage the El Torito code and emulate the CD/DVD drive in software (which may involve further emulating a floppy drive, which El Torito uses as one method of booting).

What unetbootin does is makes a FAT formatted flash drive bootable as a hard drive would boot, and copies the files from the ISO image to the target media. Some tweaks may take place (I have not looked close enough at it for details). It may still fail if the system being booted cannot cope with the fact that additional files it needs are on the flash media instead of optical media. For example, it may assume an ISO filesystem and not recognize a FAT filesystem.