Re: Do bootable USB sticks have a date of expiry?

AFAIK normally that should not be the case. The first possible thing 
that comes to my mind are Secure Boot signatures and UEFI certificate 
rotation (Microsoft was rolling out a renewed certificate for UEFI 
machines just recently), but Gentoo live images are unsigned anyway as I 
remember.

The second - is natural NAND memory data fading, when the NAND memory 
starts to lose it's data when it does not have power for a long time. 
But that's also not a thing if we talk about a "few weeks" range.

My bet is that some data on the flash drive got corrupted somehow from 
the last time it was used.

On 17.08.2026 19:12, Dr Rainer Woitok wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> less than a year back I updated my bootable USB stick with the then cur-
> rent ISO image.   However, a few weeks back  I wanted to use it,  and it
> did NOT boot.   I had to first copy  a new ISO image  onto the USB stick
> using another computer.  Is this normal?
> 
> Sincerely,
>    Rainer
>