<Sort of solved> "Unable to find a medium containing a live file system"

[smhardesty]

Thanks for your reply, gold_finger. After I got off the computer yesterday I had time to relax a bit and while watching the boob tube I had a thought. I don't believe the problem is with the BIOS or UEFI. The reason I say that is because I'm having no trouble booting to the Live stick at all. Every distro I tried booting up experienced the same problem and that was not with being seen or being booted to. I was able to at least begin booting to the Live stick with every distro I tried. Each attempt reached the second splash screen, then went to command line and gave the first of the errors.

I'm leaning towards something being amiss with the way I'm creating the USB stick. I tried creating with MintStick and UNetBootin, and also tried each of the 3 USB ports on the laptop, 2 of which are USB3 and 1 being USB2. I did try using both Legacy and UEFI in the BIOS settings and still received the same error. I never thought about GPT versus MBR as being a possible problem, but I do, in fact, have both laptops using GPT. I know I can edit the partition using Mint's Disk Utility. I might try flagging the partitions as "Legacy BIOS Bootable" before my next attempt to boot the Live stick. Not sure it would make a difference, but it's sure worth a try. I'm also going to create the USB via dd.

I'll post progress or problems later today.