Comment 55 for bug 172937

I had a similar problem: newly bought USB stick, trying to install Ubuntu 16.04 on a newly bought SSD in my Intel NUC6i3. Failing as soon as the actual installation had to start.

The NUC already runs almost a year with an external HDD. I added the SSD M.2 stick last weekend. Formatting the SSD as a new volume went without errors. I could copy data from the HDD onto the SSD. I was following along a tutorial on how to migrate the data from the HDD onto the SSD. It all went ok until I needed to fix the boot part on the SSD. That process failed and I decided to start fresh with a complete reinstall from a bootable USB drive.

I used a new Sandisk Ultra Flair 16Gb USB3.0 stick. Downloaded iso and created a bootable USB stick while running Ubuntu from the HDD. All went fine, no problems.
Booting from the stick went ok, checking the file system on the stick showed everything is ok. However, installation on the SSD went wrong somewhere in the process with the same errors explained above. Sometimes when starting the actual installation, sometimes when trying to repartition the SSD.
I've tried several iterations creating the bootable stick in Ubuntu or from Unetbootin on my Mac with 14.04 or with 16.04. All proceduced the same error. Different USB stick (same brand and model) same problem. All the time the 'check system' function said everything is ok.

Finally, I upgraded the BIOS firmware to clear out all kinds of settings and I booted an old 4Gb UBS2.0 stick with 14.04 I found. From then on all went smoothly and I have a working Ubuntu (just upgraded to) 16.04 on my SSD.

I doubt the BIOS version was the cause of the problem, since I've had the same problem with the 16Gb stick from the very start.

I wonder if the 16Gb is too big for the bootable image. When trying to reformat the stick with Gparted, I saw a warning something along the lines of 'device descriptor says blocksize 1024, while software says 512'.

Could that be the problem?