What is it that makes some USB sticks not-bootable?

Just want to share my experience. We burn a lot of bootable ISO's to flashdrives to setup anything from Windows server series to Windows 7 through 10. We ONLY have issues with Kingston drives when it comes to this. I spoke to a guy at tech support from Kingston and after a lot of useless info it basically boils down to its not guaranteed to boot. So i tried all the other troubleshooting options like diskpart, full formats and even the linux way of partitioning and formatting. So several days later i checked my bios and as always the USB disk shows as a harddrive like any other brand of USB disk. I noticed there was a note in the right hand page to "press N" to remove the Kingston USB disk as a "harddrive" which will then mark it as a removeable disk. After pressing N the disk disappeared from the harddisk list and i save/rebooted. It works perfect now!!! This wasnt necessary for any of my other USB disks which booted perfectly every time on various hardware platforms except for my Kingston G3 and Fury 3.0 drives.

Hope this could help some other frustrated techie :D

Some usb stick manufacturers factory partition drives with tables not suitable for creating a bootable drive. Formatting makes no difference as it does not affect the tables, just erases the contents of the primary, visible partition. (I had issues with a "reputable" brand before with this issue.)

If you have access to a Linux box, plug the drive in, find what Linux names the device as then run:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd***  

(change *** to the device name given)

This wipes the drive completely (by filling it with binary zeros), file system, PTs the lot. So make sure you specify the correct device!!! Then reformat (FAT32 is better as UEFI doesn't support NTFS) and you should be good to go.

I dealt with this problem with my SanDisk drive and the only solution for me was to purchase another drive. Check your drive in the "This PC" menu of your computer. Flash drives usually show up as a removable disk. This information about this drive being bootable or or is usually contained within the flash drive itself. Here is mine, for example: .

To protect users from destroying their entire hard drive, Microsoft and other disk burning utilities limit themselves to only being able to burn onto so-called "removable" disks- USB drives, CDs, DVDs, etc. What happened is that some companies (one of them SanDisk) sold misconfigured flash drives with the bit for being removable off. I'm not too sure how exactly this information is stored, but as far as I know there is no way to change the firmware. You'll have to purchase a new flash drive, or alternatively, you may be able to convince the company to give you a refund/replace your flash drive.

Sources:

• SanDisk forum