Laptop stopped booting USB (solved)

[xenial]

hello forum.
I would like to explain my current set up and the subsequent issue i am having.
My laptop has xenialpup32bit installed on my internal hard drive and it works perfectly and has done for a couple of years.

I formatted a usb flash drive to fat32 and i had 3 pups installed on that.

ISSUE.
Now out of the blue my laptop is not "seeing" or even attempting to boot the usb at all and is acting as if it does not exist at all.
i have entered the BIOS and changed boot orders and still no dice.I have unplugged and plugged in the usb and still nothing.
So my next action was to plug in an external hard drive with xenialpup installed and i know for a fact it used to boot up fine but now that fails to be seen or even attempt to boot.

So now i only have my internal hard drive pup working.
Not sure if this is my aged laptop failing on me or not?

Any help or input on this please/.

[rockedge]

This sounds like USB drive failure! Or the usb port is suspect. Try moving the USB drive to another usb port if possible. Can GParted in Xenial "see" the drive at all? If moving to another port doesn't work (probably won't) and GParted can not see the USB drive would likely mean drive failure.

Is it possible to see the usb drive's partitions when the drive is plugged in while Xenial is up and running?

[xenial]

Hello rockedge and thank you for your response.

Yes Gparted is seeing the usb just fine and the usb runs ok when i plug it in using the built in xenial..It is just on boot up that the usb is being ignored and also my external hard drive gets ignored also so i may have to face the reality that this oldish laptop is on its last legs.

I did notice one oddity.
last time i rebooted using the usb it got stuck on the compaq home page in the boot up sequence and i had to perform a hard reset and the usb has never been the same since....so user error?

I do have a pup installed on a optical disk if the internal drive decides to quit on me but i was usiing the usb as a sort of back up pup.

[bigpup]

Go into the computers UEFI/Bios setup
Look for an option to enable/disable USB booting.
You want it set to enable
Save the change when you exit the setup.
Now try it.

it got stuck on the compaq home page in the boot up sequence and i had to perform a hard reset

This may have done an actual default setup of the UEFI/Bios settings.
Default settings usually has USB booting disabled.

[watchdog]

I have a laptop which is not able to boot usb. No Bios setup for booting usb. I solved this problem with plopkexec. Read this thread:

viewtopic.php?p=8072#p8072

[esos]

I would do a basic test (minimize problem).
Is your USB drive realy bootable (healthy)?
Just test it on other computer.

If it is not bootable, you know the problem!
If yes it is healty, the problem could be USB port(s) or BIOS problem.

How many USB port(s) in your laptop?
Unplug every devices attach to it.
Start boot testing with your USB drive one by one to any port(s)

Good luck!

[xenial]

Just an update.
Issue fixed.

I entered the BIOS and changed the boot order and voila the usb now boots.
I don't know what the heck happened but it has performed self surgery and appears fixed.

I would like to thank everyone for the input.

[bigpup]

I edited the topic subject with solved.