Live USB Gets Blinking Cursor

[apyrexia]

Hello everyone,
I'm new here. I'm interested in installing Mageia and checking it out. I made a live USB and it won't work, I only get a blinking cursor. Can you help me? I'll do a full explanation so we can hopefully skip over a lot of the standard troubleshooting.

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 on a Sony VPCEB47GM 64-bit system

-First I reformatted the drive, MBR and all, and made a FAT partition.
-Then I downloaded Mageia-2-LiveCD-GNOME-Europe1-Americas-x86_64-CD.iso
-I ran sudo fdisk -l to find the proper device node which was sdb1.
-I CD'd to the directory with the file and ran this command, which was suggested here
dd if=Mageia-2-LiveCD-GNOME-Europe1-Americas-x86_64-CD.iso of=/dev/sdb1 bs=1M
-Terminal was busy for a while without any outputs and about 5 minutes later it said something like files transferred successfully (I don't have logs for this, but it seems like everyone worked right).
-I then rebooted my computer which is already set up in the BIOS menu to have USB boot priority
-The screen I got was black with a blinking white cursor in the top left
-Next I booted back into Ubuntu and changed the partition on the drive to be bootable which dd didn't do (it seems to have remade the partition).
-I tried booting again and no change

And here I am now on the forum.

Thanks for any help all, this project looks wonderful and I'd love to get involved. First this initial hurdle.

apyrexia

[alf]

That's your mistake, you've to dump the iso to the whole device not to a partition.

dd if=Mageia-2-LiveCD-GNOME-Europe1-Americas-x86_64-CD.iso of=/dev/sdb1 bs=1M

You've to do it this way:

Code: Select all

dd if=Mageia-2-LiveCD-GNOME-Europe1-Americas-x86_64-CD.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

[apyrexia]

Thanks, ill give that a try.