I was having all kind of trouble installing Ubuntu Server today. I tried writing the disc image to a USB in a variety of ways, but it kept failing at various points of the install, check disks never succeeded, and I couldn’t help but notice I wasn’t even seeing a couple of the screens I expected too.

Over lunch I found this:

Due to changes in syslinux, it is not currently possible to use usb-creator from 14.04 and earlier releases to write USB images for 15.04 or later; we believe that it is also not possible to use usb-creator from a 15.04 or later system to write USB images for earlier releases. For now the workaround is to use a matching release of Ubuntu to write the images, but we intend to issue updates soon to work around this incompatibility

So the issue was the computer I was creating the USB on wasn’t compatible with the Ubuntu server image I was creating.

Here’s the solution:

1. Right click your ubuntu-15.10-desktop-amd64.iso > Open with Disk Image writer
2. Choose your usb drive and click Start Restoring… and follow the instruction.