drumcode great troubleshooting.
"Again, while Linux recognises the stick and its contents fine with whatever filesystem is on it, both Laptop and Desktop BIOSes won't"
---invisible even to the boot order...I would second your opinion of firmware.
"Trying ext4 with 4096 bytes works fine as expected, smaller block sizes are not allowed, because the logical sectors are 'vendor set' and not changeable."
----there does not seem to be any getting around this. But I always thought DD could...
Fat32 makes a nice landing space for the subsequent Ext4, and so does VFat so we can throw formatting out the window it sounds. At the end of the day, however, I've installed solus a few times with a 20-year-old loose and shaky Verbatim stick...maybe 're-purpose' the Mushkin🙂.
