How to boot ubuntu via usb on the Vostro 3460

First a little background. I was very happy when I received my Vostro 3460 it has 4 usb 3.0 ports (most notebooks in the same price range have only 2 usb 3.0 ports and two or one usb 2.0 ports) an msata slot and a removable dvd drive which I quickly replaced with a hard disk caddy. All for lest than $500, it's refurbished but you would never be able to tell it was just by looking at it.

I was however very disappointed that I couldn't boot an Ubuntu live usb or any other Linux live usb's (remember I replaced the dvd drive) no matter what I did. I tried unetbootin, universal usb installer, Xboot, Rmprep and a few others. I even tried Win32 Disk Imager. I tried different usb thumb drives, cheap ones and higher-end usb 3.0 drives. No matter what, I still received the same error message not a com32r image or something similar. I should note that for some odd reason it will boot Acronis True Image 2013 rescue CD from a usb thumb drive.

I found the solution quite by accident. I had burned Ubuntu 12.10 to an SDHC card using Unetbootin mostly because I was out of usb thumb drives and since there doesn't appear to be an option for booting from an SD card slot on the Vostro. So I placed the SD card in a Sandisk micromate; see here: Amazon.com: Sandisk MicroMate Reader - for SD and SDHC memory cards: Electronics and it booted successfully. I was also able to boot a Parted Magic live image using the same method. I have no idea why it works!