Issue with making a bootable Ubuntu 15.04 USB stick

I wanted to create a boot USB stick from an Ubuntu 15.04 desktop that was running in a Virtual machine. So I plugged in a clean USB stick, and picked “Startup Disk Creator” from the Launcher. Then picked the USB stick as the target, and waited for 15 minutes. When the utility was done, it just disappeared, so coming back later to the computer there was no positive indication that all was well. But the old UNIX tradition is that all is well if there are no complaints.

Plugging the USB stick into the target computer I got

SYSLINUX 6.03 EDD 20150318 Copyright (C) 1994-2014 H. Peter Anvin et al
WARNING: No configuration file found
boot:

This seems to happen to people, and the advice differ. Here’s how I solved it.

I followed two advice on this page:

1. I set up a 2 GB FAT16 partition on the USB stick, instead of the FAT32. The command for formatting was:

   $ sudo mkdosfs -R 1 -F 16 /dev/sda1

   Note that /dev/sda1 happened to point at the USB stick on my machine, but on yours it could be the “real” hard disk. So don’t just copy this!
   Frankly, I don’t think this was the issue (doing this alone didn’t help)

2. I copied the isolinux directory on the USB stick to syslinux (maybe renaming would be enough) and then renamed isolinux.bin to syslinux.bin, isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg. And that was it.

And then Ubuntu booted properly.