thanks for the advice... I think I'm making some progress. The USB stick checked out fine so no issues there and I moved on to trying sysresccd. This too hung after the initial syslinux line but it did indicate that it reached the "Probing EDD" stage and that I should turn it off. After do...

thanks for responding... yes, I've tried partitioning and formatting a few times using fdisk and gparted and trying both ext2 and ext3. I've also tried wiping just the MBR (with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=446 count=1) and both the MBR and partition table (same command but with block size of 512)...

I have a couple of sticks that I'm trying to get 5.2.8 installed on. One works and one doesn't work and I'm wondering what the difference is. The working one is a 512mb Kingston... the failing one is a 2gb no-brand moody stick that seems to work as a regular drive with no issues. When I boot, I see ...