Thumb drive detected in windows, but not at boot.

Today I bought a new USB 3.0 thumb drive to make a recovery media. Windows detects it, no problems. I used Toshiba Recovery Media Creator. It completed successfully. Then I rebooted only to see if the media is actually bootable, in case something happens. Then it hangs. I don't even see the bios splash screen. Just a black screen with a cursor. The system reboots when I remove it or when I wait about 2 minutes. The HDD is first in the boot order. I usualy select the boot device with F12 when I try to boot something different than the HDD. I am able to boot from another thumb drive (usb 2.0 8gb). My new recovery media is bootable on another laptop (3 years old). I tried to make an image of GParted for i686, in case the most recent version of the iso were made for UEFI. Still nothing. But the old thumb drive boots. I don't anything in the BIOS for Legacy or UEFI, or Secure Boot. So what's happenning? Does the BIOS need an upgrade?? The thumb drive is a Kingston Datatraveller 101 g3 usb3.0 (32 gb). The laptop is 5 years old Toshiba satellite T230.

No USB3 ports on this laptop. Howerver isn't it backward compatible? Windows is handling the USB3.0 thumb drive once booted. Maybe Windows loads the appropriate drivers to handle 3.0 USB devices but they are not supported until the OS is loaded. So that's why I considered updating the BIOS. But I don't want to update the BIOS for no reason.

Indeed, Toshiba's software is not the best at all! Humm so that could work! I even have an external hard drive containing the recovery partitions. So how does that work then? The idea is to dual boot windows 7 along with Debian Linux. So I have to repartition, change the Windows partition to a logical, shrink volumes, etc, etc. So I wanted to be safe in case windows can't find the recovery partitions anymore. Does the Windows recovery process would restore partitions scheme? Would it even install if I change the windows partition to a logical? The Win OS and the recovery partitions would stay at the same place in the HDD. I would just put linux in between. Problem is that Windows if kind of dumb for these things and assume that it is the only OS installed on the machine all the time. I don't really know the behavior of Windows in this process...

Actually it's not that bad. Well... Sometimes it's quite a pain ITA, you're right... But I've been doing it this way for at least the last 5-6 years. Unlike Windows, Linux manage dual boot very well, but must be installed after windows though. Otherwise, Windows overwrites everything in the MBR. But this is the first time I do it on someone else's machine, so that's why I want to have some kind of "panic button" :) I have been able to use the recovery partitions on my own laptop, and it re-installed Windows 8 on the C: partition, leaving the rest intact. But mine is UEFI, so already with logical paritions. In the current case, I need to convert a primary partition to a logical partition. I fear that windows may not be able to find the recovery partitions anymore after that. I never tried it so I don't know... But in the end, what matters to me is to be able to boot a windows recovery process and use the provided factory image to have a bootable Windows OS. It doesn't matter if the image comes from a partition or a usb drive. I already copied those partitions anyway. It would even be nice to use this extra space of 30-40 gb that the recovery partitions use. I will try the method you explain in the last post. It seems promising.

Hmm, I understand the feeling!