I recently bought one of these tiny SanDisk Cruzer things.

I cannot for the life of me get it to boot anything. I am using this Memtest utility to test, and I can boot my laptop (a Lenovo T530) from another USB key (so I know my laptop is not at fault). The SanDisk came pre-installed with some awful software (which might have been U3, I am not sure) and I have performed various formats, most recently one using the HDDGuru low level format tool.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

Yes - Get another drive, such as a Lexar or Toshiba. They are so cheap it isn't worth stuffing around with ones that do like you describe.

I don't know what they smoke at the Sandisk R & D dept, but I want some.

Some USB Drives just suck at being used for booting.

I think this is enough proof:

Google search: ... why sandisk usb boot wont
About 310,000 results
"I've gotten my 4 GB Sandisk flash drive to boot. But, my 8 GB drive won't."
"Cannot boot from LiveUSB created with Pendrivelinux "
"Why doesnt my computer detect my 32g sandisk usb stick "
etc etc etc.

cheers!
HaQue

Thanks for the reply. I will certainly take your recommendation of brands next time because, even though I have disabled autoplay, right clicking the drive in order to get at the format command caused explorer to lock up... God knows what it was doing... In the end I stuck it in my Synology NAS and formatted it from there. Horrible!

However, I fear I may have wasted your time with this post. I had concluded that the computer was not at fault because it appeared to try to boot from another USB stick - actually, it failed, but with another error message which I dismissed because I had not used that drive in some time - but it appeared at least to have tried. However, it turns out that if I applied the same method to that drive then it failed in the same way. Not only that, but both drives succeeded when I finally managed to get hold of another computer. So, I was a little hasty. A bit more digging and experimentation has shown that actually it is a UEFI issue - I had to enable the legacy BIOS mode. Doh. I used to keep "up to date" with "computers and stuff", but it appears that I am lagging behind these days!

a, well no problems, at least your experience is here now for anyone googling similiar things to find. all these small nuggets are valuable to someone.
good luck