Hello. If this has been solved somewhere else, please point me there. I downloaded the Simplicity 15.7 ISO to my LMDE laptop partition, formatted my 32 GB Kingston USB to FAT32 using USB Stick Formatter, and then created a Simplicity live boot USB from USB Image Writer. I then reboot my laptop (set to legacy mode, no secure boot), hit F12 to get into boot options, select the USB 2.0 drive, and hit "Enter" in order to boot. There is a brief pause, after which my regular HDD Grub menu is presented for standard HDD boot. The USB option is no longer there, and the previous attempt to boot the USB Simplicity live boot has disappeared into the ether. I have successfully booted and installed at least half a dozen distros on this and my other laptops using this method with no problems.

After the same failure from four HDD installations across two laptops (Dell 3000 with LMDE Betsy/Peppermint 6, Dell 5000 with LMDE Betsy/Mint Cinnamon 17.2) I tried creating a Virtualbox machine from the same Simplicity ISO, and that works fine. This ONLY occurs with the Simplicity USB (other distros of Mint, Debian, Peppermint, Solydx, and LMDE live USBs have had no boot problems).

I have looked on this forum and elsewhere, have found similar issues with people trying to boot Puppy from a live USB, but so far have found no definitive answers. This is not a problem with EFI compatibility, as I am using Legacy on all my laptops.

Thanks for any help you might be able to provide. I have a funny feeling this is a common issue and I'm just missing the targets somehow.

Curt

I just tried to boot my old Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbook from the same USB stick (this is the netbook version of simplicity). Again, pressed F12, selected "USB Storage" from the boot menu, and hit Return. This machine has no EFI. It attempts to boot from the USB but quickly informs that "Operating System not found" - which is at least slightly more informative than the newer Dell laptops previously mentioned. Obviously, the ISO itself is bootable, as Virtualbox has no issues. The problem is with booting from the USB. I unfortunately have no CD/DVD drives on any of these machines with which to test the Simplicity live boot.

Curt

Syslinux boot loader in Puppy is looking for a usb probably.
Change it to pmedia=cd.

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/BootParameters

Then Puppy will think the usb is a cd and boot ok.
Worth trying anyways. If it already says cd,
Change it to pmedia=usbflash and try that.

Ah, thanks for the link! I believe you have found the issue. The target file on the boot stick is "isolinux.cfg", which points to "cd" as the boot device. That it works with Virtualbox using a virtual cd device makes sense. I'll need to edit the ISO and retry, but I'm pretty confident that your solution will work.

Thanks again, rokytnji!