Need Help booting from USB on a IBM T42 Thinkpad!

[ianrocker]

Hello,

so I'm pretty new to computer hardware, so please excuse me if I'm woefully ignorant here.

I have an old IBM T42 Thinkpad without a HDD and I'm trying to have the computer boot from a USB drive with LinuxMint on it.

My main computer is an iMac with OSX Yosemite. I used the unebootin app to make the USB drive bootable with LinuxMint.

On the T42 I went into the Bios and reset the boot order to boot first from the USB drive, but when I try to boot I receive an error message saying Pen Drive without OS.

I was curious if this is still a problem with the USB drive, or if I need to do something else with the T42. Thanks!

[Neil]

Looks like you have the T42 set correctly to boot from USB first. You can also press F12 at the IBM splash and choose your boot device from the list. Note that not all USB flash drives are equal when it comes to booting from them. Also Unetbootin usually works, but not always. First try you USB drive on another computer to see if it will boot there. If not, it's almost certainly a problem with either the drive or the Unetbootin install.

[dr_st]

Ditto on trying on another PC, if possible.

I've seen bootable USB drives which from some reason refused to boot in one PC, even though they booted in another, and the problematic PC could boot from other USB drives.

It goes to show that not all USB bootloaders are equal, and some are more compatible than others.

[RealBlackStuff]

Get Rufus, and your problem should be solved!

[Cigarguy]

I find USB 3.0 drives will NOT boot on T400/T500 or older Thinkpads. USB 2.0 drives works great. I have a few USB 2.0 32 GB drives dedicated for this purpose.

[ianrocker]

Hey everyone, thanks for the help!

@dr_st
Thank you for the heads up, unfortunately right now I don't have another PC to try it on, but if I can find one, I will!

@RealBlackStuff
I tried to use Rufus, but isn't it only for Linux/Windows? Is there a version for Mac?

@Cigarguy
Thank you for the heads up! How do I tell if my flash drive is USB 2.0 or 3.0?

Thanks!

[axur-delmeria]

If you look at the connector end of any USB 3.0 device, you'll see 5 additional pins in the back, as can be seen in this image courtesy of Wikipedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... SB_3.0.png

Also, the plastic part of the connector is colored blue. I'm not sure if this mandated by the USB 3.0 specification though.