Failure installing Ubuntu 24.04 on an USB stick

[Volker Wysk]

Hi!

I've written the Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop installer image to an USB stick and 
booted from it. Then I went through the installer to install a fresh Ubuntu
on another USB stick.

I've chosen to do "Festplatte löschen und Ubuntu installieren" (translated
back to English: "delete hard disk and install Ubuntu") installation method.
It went smoothly. 

But then I couldn't boot the new system. I get an empty screen with just a
blinking cursor.

Inspecting the (second) USB stick, I see that it doesn't have an EFI System
Partition. There's just one very small first (1 MB) partition, with a file
system unrecognized by Gparted. In the second partition, which encompasses
most of the place, there's a "/boot" directory, but it includes only four
small files, with names beginning with "memtest86".

I've successfully installed Ubuntu 22.04 on USB sticks, previously.

The machine on which I did it, is an oldish laptop, which doesn't have UEFI
(but the old BIOS boot method). But I can't boot the new system on this
laptop either.

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Volker