USB sticks, a story (related to Macrium Reflect).

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Was donated an older i5 HP desktop. Was to be scrapped. Failed HD replaced with a cheap ssd, and all well. The whole machine fast as hell actually.

Now, after the usual late night experiments, wanted to go back to yesterday's Reflect image, in goes my faithful USB Reflect boot stick (which always worked perfect on every thinkable pc\laptop). Nothing, not even the led light on the stick and not showing up in the boot device list. Soooo? simply go to bios, set up legacy etc. Still nothing, ok, did not set bios correctly. Tried again, nothing. Reset bios to factory, tried again. Nothing. Hunted around bios for something or a clue. All USB ports ok, maybe some special jumpers on the motherboard to disallow USB boot?? Total confusion.

Then after some hours of headscratching... the USB stick itself ?? Tested by booting my 2 Dell laptops, zero problems. So it must be the HP pc!. Back to bios settings. Still no boot. Last resort ... another USB stick? Actually copied the Reflect boot files from the 1st stick to another stick ...and the HP booted immediately from it.

Should have taken the clue earlier > the missing led light on the 1st stick, and immediately used another stick.

Moral of the story, USB sticks are not made equal. Behaving perfectly normal for standard file operations and everything else on some machines does not guarantee success in all cases.