Trouble creating a live USB

[Steerpike]

I have WattOS R9 Microwatt, 64-bit, and I'm trying to boot a live USB on a Toshiba Satellite.

When I put in the live USB, the light on the USB stick comes on, because the boot order is set to look for the USB first, but instead of booting the live USB it goes straight to my normal Grub menu (Elementary OS and Windows 10). I've tried two different USB sticks, one of which I've used to create live USBs for other distros and never had a problem. I also tried creating the live USB in both Unetbootin and Universal USB Installer (choosing WattOS as the distro in the latter during creation of the USB).

I've run out of ideas as to what to try. Laptop doesn't have an optical drive. I could check out the distro in VMWare, but if I like it and want to install I'm not sure how to get around the USB issue. Thoughts?

[leenie]

maybe the live usb needs to be plugged in before power on.

[teejay]

Welcome Steerpike.
You've already covered a lot of bases, a good start.

It sounds like there are no signs of error from the USB creation process, but apparently the USB is not identified as bootable.   
Not sure about the age of your Satellite, but I assume it has booted from one of the previously-successful USB sticks.  So boot from USB is possible.
Were any of those successful boots using Ubuntu-based distros ?   (microwatt R9 is based on Ubuntu 14.04) 
When the Satellite boots, can you read the USB stick which it has ignored for booting ? Or is it ignored completely ?
Does your Satellite have a UEFI mobo ?

You're obviously aware that there are non-apparent differences among USB sticks.  (In my case, I used a Strontium stick for data, and still do, but it flatly refuses to behave as bootable, just as you're finding.)  Sadly, we seem destined to discover this the hard way. 
A couple of possibilities for you :
- you might need to format the USB stick back to FAT32 before you start (can elementary or Win10 do that ?)
- using Rufus under Win7 works smoothly, and I assume also under Win10    If you read instructions online, make sure they're for a current/near-current version of Rufus. 
- if you search online, include Ubuntu 14.04 in the search .... too many of the fail stories are now out-of-date

When you solve this, there is an audience who'd love to know ! 
Best of luck 

[Steerpike]

Thanks for the responses, guys. I'd tried what is recommended here already, so no luck on those suggestions.

Yes, my motherboard does have UEFI. I thought 14.04, on which WattOS is based, worked with UEFI. Is that not the case? It's been a while since I've tried a distro that didn't work with UEFI, and I don't know enough to try to make it work if it isn't already capable of doing so. I did run WattOS in VMWare, and I really like the distro. If I can't get this version to work, I'll check again on R10.

Thanks again!

[Steerpike]

You guys have really turned me on to i3. I liked it so much using WattOS in a virtual machine that I installed it in Elementary OS, and now I'm using it there. Getting better battery life. I'll be watching for R10!