Cannot boot from Yumi multiboot USB stick

I know its a couple years late, but here goes....

It can be a factor of factory formatting. Many USB sticks are formatted USB-FDD (Floppy disk) when what you really need is USB-HDD. Windows inherently formats USB drives as FDD for which it will not write to MBR. But with a specific command line called DISKPART you can wipe the disk and set it up as a USB-HDD with an appropriate MBR. Here are some pretty simple steps, take caution though, one small misstep could send to "no-reboot land":

  1. Run Comand Prompt as Admin and use the following commands:
  2. DISKPART
  3. LIST DISK - find the disk number of the usb drive
  4. SELECT DISK # - # being your usb drive ( WARNING MAKE SURE YOU ARE SELECTING THE CORRECT DRIVE OTHERWISE THIS COULD BE DISASTROUS )
  5. CLEAN
  6. ACTIVE - Make the drive active
  7. FORMAT FS=FAT32 - fat16/32 are the best option for syslinux
  8. ASSIGN
  9. EXIT

This should get you ready to go unless the USB drive is truly the culprit. This just fixed the exact SAME problem I was having with YUMI.


So the problem is solved. Seems that something was wrong with 2 USB sticks(Kingston DT 100 G2 and Spaceloop XL), because when I made bootable USB with third stick - it started without any problems. But still, I can't understand why these sticks weren't working.