I no longer have this problem. This is my setup and changes that I tried.
Clevo P150EM (custom BIOS by prema) SSD (windows) HDD (general data) mSATA SSD (ubuntu) I know the problem wasn't with the boot media itself. I tried different USB ports, usb sticks and usb creator software packages (YUMI, unetbootin, Universal USB Installer, and dd), all of which gave failed boot with 13.10 x64 (initramfs). The same live USBs worked fine on my desktop computer. I installed 12.04 x64 and thenafter 13.04 x64 which worked fine. I could successfully upgrade 13.04 to 13.10. I flashed my BIOS back to the stock versions supplied by CLEVO, but still had the same problem with the 13.10 live usb. I disconnected all disks (HDD SSD) apart from the mSATA. I tried formatting the mSATA disk with gparted live usb (new partition table and new partitions) - still no luck. I noticed on my 13.10 install (upgraded from 13.04) that nautilus listed a few extra partitions under "Devices" that I didn't recognise. When I selected these partitions they failed to mount. These looked like they were being picked up somehow from when I was playing around with archlinux and btrfs (whole disk filesystem, compression no partitions), despite my attempts and deleting all existing partitions with gparted and creating a new partition table. I zeroed the disk with dd, after which I could install 13.10 successfully from live usb. So possible solution is zeroeing disk with dd? someone my be able to suggest more from what I found. hope that helps -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1241589 Title: ubuntu 13.10 unable to boot on live usb (busy box - initramfs) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1241589/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
