If I recall correctly, the USB stick needs to have an EFI boot kernel or else it can't boot. I used the System Rescue CD image on a USB stick to boot EFI and install Gentoo on an Lenovo Helix and a Lenovo server and it recognized the stick automatically in EFI mode. Either that or change the BIOS back to MBR mode to boot a traditional non-EFI stick. It takes more fiddling to get EFI to boot, but it is pretty slick once it works. REFInd works good for dual-booting Windows and Linux via EFI. Peter On Sun, 2013-10-13 at 10:45 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > On Sun, 13 Oct 2013, Prof J C Nash (U30A) wrote: > > > Most ASUS laptops give boot choice if you hit ESC while splash is showing. At > > least all my 5 do. > > but all that does is dump me into the BIOS, and let me work my way > to the boot menu, where i can apparently "Create" a new boot entry, > but i have no idea what to add there -- the only example i see is this > long, incomprehensible string that looks like a device identifier, and > i don't know what to do from there.