[plug] Strange USB Boot Issue

[Tim]

I'm working on an Acer Aspire L320 (A small compact computer, about 3
years old) which has stopped working for a friend. It was running
vista. I happened to have a Win 7 bootable USB stick that I booted off
into the Win 7 install. This didn't help because I could see the
partitions but couldn't even find out what was wrong, and the "boot"
fix didn't work. (Seeing as it wouldn't boot into vista).
So I then got my Lucid bootable usb stick and attempted to boot off
that. Only the bios wouldn't see the stick to boot from it, even
though it would see the win 7 usb stick. So I then took the Win 7
stick and formatted it, using unetbootin I put Lucid on that. Still no
luck.
I've confirmed on another machine that the Lucid stick works and boots fine.

So it would appear that this Acer bios only detects a Windows bootable
usb stick, and not a Linux bootable usb stick!?!? When referring to
detecting it, I'm referring to the boot device menu which lets you
select the device to boot from.

I'm currently burning a Lucid cdrom and hoping the cd drive in the
machine works. Has anyone else come across a bios that won't see a
bootable usb stick with syslinux/isolinux but will see other boot usb
sticks? I will attempt a grub2 usb drive later today. Any other work
around people have used?

Thanks

Tim

-- 
Timothy White - Somewhere in Australia