USB Boot Issue on Thinkpad X120e

[ten]

I'm having trouble booting from USB flash drives on my X120e.

The issue:

I have a usb drive plugged in with a bootable image, but when I select it from the BIOS menu, the screen just flickers and I end up back at the boot device selection menu.

I've tried different boot images, different flash drives, and different methods of copying over the ISO. (Unetbootin, and dd'ing the iso to the drive.) I plugged in a USB CDROM drive, and it booted the CD that was in the drive. Any ideas what could be going on here?

[someotherguy]

Can you boot the USB flash drive on a different computer?

[ten]

Just tried, and neither of the two USB drives seem to be working on a different computer. Weird. I'll try using a different image, although I already tried two different ones.

[someotherguy · Accepted solution]

It sounds like you are not "burning" the ISO to the memory key properly.  In Windows, I use UltraISO to do that:

1.  File -> Open, browse to the ISO

2.  Bootable -> Write Disk Image, then click on the "Write" button.

[ten]

That seems to have been part of the issue. I think I had also screwed up the partitions on the USB drive, and it works now. Thanks for the replies.