I recently spent far longer than I would have liked trying to install xubuntu onto my old Dell Mini 10v. Usually, I’d use unetbootin to create a bootable USB and it’d boot and install fine. However, I kept getting the following error every time I tried this time round:

BOOTMGR is missing.
Press CTRL + ALT + DELETE TO Restart</blockquote>

I tried using older versions of Netbootin that I’d used successfully in the past, but to no avail. After a bit of guesswork and Googling, I discovered that the solution is to format the USB stick as FAT32, not NTFS. Once I’d done that and run Unetbootin again, the laptop booted and installed first time :)

Michael Heap

Michael is a polyglot software engineer, committed to reducing complexity in systems and making them more predictable. Working with a variety of languages and tools, he shares his technical expertise to audiences all around the world at user groups and conferences. You can follow @mheap on Twitter