Making a utilitarian USB key, and I'm stuck!

[Golden]

Mmm. Could be Greg. All my bootable USB's are USB2.

 

[mjf]

Have now formatted and reloaded various ISO's 3 times and can't get past blinking cursor at boot on 2 home PC's

I would think USB3 shouldn't be the issue since this is lower layer stuff but who knows. Of course the USB3 drivers need to be installed, manually or automatically. The DISM utility allows you to add them to a Winpe/re ISO.
Have you tried USB2 and had the same problems?
More generally:
Are we talking about Windows installers or just general utility ISOs (eg. Macrium recovery, Partition Wizard)?
I think you can have one Winpe / Winre but there may be problems with multiple on the single flash drive partition. I have no problems with a single Winre.

Some USB flash drives do allow you to partition them but they are so cheap I'd just have a few.
With Grub4Dos the menu.lst is the key. Happy to mail mine if it helps.

 

[gregrocker]

I don't think the stick needs USB3 drivers since it boots fine on two home PC's when formatted and written by UltraISO which uses nt60 bootsect rather than ISOlinux. I think it's unable to read the ISOlinux as evidenced by the prompt when it loads on one PC to update DMI for ISOlinux. Does anyone know how this is done as I avoid Linux for reasons like this?