I've been starting to wonder if I can make some sort of comparison between my successfully bootable Pup431 stick and my non-booting Racy53 stick in order to pin down what is upsetting my machine.rcrsn51 wrote: There is definitely something slightly different about your particular machine.
I can't see how it's a Gparted issue, which suggests that the new syslinux is causing the trouble.
I've been doing a bit of research about Gparted and wondering if it is not so much Gparted that is contributing - but maybe how I am using Gparted?? I now realise that partitioning utils and bootloaders are rather more complex than the simple Gparted gui might suggest. And also that there are other partitioners that do a better job of revealing problems that a user might introduce. I have been using the default Gparted parameters, but am reading that features like round-to-cylinders and round-to MiB are critical in terms of optimising performance. I am assuming that my Bios is not happy with something that the Racy53 version of Gparted and universal installer is formatting either at the hardware partition level, logical partition level, mbr, or partition table.
(I also read something about 4k boundaries being desirable on a Windows machine - I know that is of no interest here, but it is an example of the underlying complexity of getting the disk correctly setup for the specific OS).
There has to be some parameter that varies between the two sticks - and maybe the bios is expecting a "Windows-like" parameter, rather than the way Linux wants the partitioning etc to be. Maybe my bios is the faulty component - either way I would like to drill down to compare the sticks and try to gain more info.