Creating a USB media using UNetbootin isn't recognized as booting media

I've installed Ubuntu by USB many times before. It's not working now and I'm not sure why.

I format the USB drive (a Kingston DataTraveler 100 G2, 16 GB) using GParted by wiping it and installing a FAT32 primary partition on it. I change the permissions of the drive filesystem from root to the main user (sudo chown user1: /media/user1/4B8C-3997). I download Ubuntu (wget http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/ubuntu-cdimage/15.10/ubuntu-15.10-desktop-amd64.iso) and then write the ISO to USB using UNetbootin. Then, when I try to boot from the drive, it simply loops back to asking which drive to boot from.

Do you have any ideas about what might be causing this?

Solution 1:

Unetbootin does not create the Ubuntu installation media properly.
Use the Disks tool (gnome-disk-utility) to create the USB media.

Open Disks, select Restore Disk Image from the menu on the top right.
Choose the ISO file and the USB drive to write it to and start restoring.

When you want to create the installation media from within Windows,
boot Windows, open command prompt as administrator and execute :

diskpart
list disk  
select disk *  
clean  
create partition primary  
active  
format fs=fat32 quick  
assign letter=**  

Note : * = number of USB drive | ** = select a free drive letter
Now mount the ISO file and copy the content to the USB disk.

Solution 2:

Use this git clone for a faster bootable usb creator.

git clone git://github.com/pbatard/rufus

Alternative Windows mirror: https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/archive/v2.8.zip

It can also format the partition to FAT32 easily