Unfortunately even bootable usb sticks get ignored. GRUB boots no matter what.

Can you boot of a bootable CD?
Have you tried restoring the defaults in bios?

Then changes in your BIOS are not taking effect for some reason as Grub doesn't appear until you get to the hard drive.
You might try posting all the options you see under each in Boot: CDROM, Removable Devices and HDD.

I get whatever USB I have in SanDisk Cruzer or Kingston something or other
ATA HDD
CD
IPv4
ubuntu (which is a grub launcher)
and USB FDD, which idk what exactly that is.

And no I haven't tried a CD, but I don't have any blanks or otherwise that I could boot from. If it's not booting from the same USB that I've booted from before, I have no reason to believe it would on a CD drive either.

---------- Post added 12-07-12 at 01:21 PM ----------

also, yes I've tried restoring the defaults and had no luck.

Well I got the live usb I made for Fedora to run, but the one I made for Rescatux and SuperGrubDisk don't load, which means I didn't make them correctly. What am I doing wrong? I used UNetbootin to create them, but it isn't booting. What gives?

used unetbootin on Ubuntu 12.04 and it didn't load again; apparently UNetBootin isn't working for me.

Well, I see two different issues here:
1. Being able to boot from usb at all.
2. Weather or not the usb live distro you've created is done properly i.e. the PC tried to load from the USB drive, but failed for some reason

You should address them separately. The first one's on the bios/uefi side, the second one's on the live usb side

Read this short doc about the boot process.

Right; I am able to boot from the USB as I found out when booting from my original Fedora USB. The live USB creator (UNetBootin) is not working however, anything created with that fails to boot.

What sort of boot are you getting from the USB? Is it grub, efi or something else?

It's just what you get when you first load fedora. It says "Start Fedora 17" and "Troubleshooting." It's just a live usb

I suspect that part of the problem is that you don't really know what is going on with your booting process and you don't really understand what you've been doing. I suspect that efi is disabled or broken on your PC. The only way you are able to boot is the old way through the MBR which is why you always get grub. If this particular USB is MBR based and those that don't work are efi based that would be consistent with this theory. You could check this out by mounting the USB sticks that don't work and seeing of they have efi systems. Alternatively you could try and create a USB elilo boot stick from scratch following the instructions on the slackware wiki. Youmust get efi working if you want to boot windows.

I was planning to buy a laptop soon and the majority of them have windows 8. It looks like this secure boot thing even when diable can still cause problems. I'm going with system76 or Zareason when I am ready to buy since my main interest is linux as my main OS.

Well I was able to get Ubuntu running just fine since Ubuntu creates its own boot location in UEFI, so I could do either windows from the hdd or ubuntu from what was called 'ubuntu' in the boot menu. Since Fedora doesn't do that, it forced the HDD to boot into GRUB 2.00, which doesn't load win8. Ubuntu 12.04 was using GRUB 1.99 which didn't boot windows either, but like I said I could go into the boot menu and switch between grub and windows.

Once I repair the bootloader for win8, I'm going to try EasyBCD as recommended by a user, and if that still doesn't work I'll just go back to Ubuntu since it worked for me earlier, so don't be completely intimidated by win8.

Well just as an epilogue, I couldn't find a recovery disk anywhere, so I just pirated an install disk that has the repair function built into it. I used that, and now if I enable Secure Boot and boot from the hard drive, it goes straight to Windows 8, but if I disable secure boot, it boots into Grub 1.99, which I'm currently using for Ubuntu 12.04.

All this could have been avoided with a little bit of foresight on my part to create a repair drive (which is the first thing I did in Windows 8.) I plan on using EasyBCD to see if I can maybe avoid going into the BIOS to switch between the two, but even if I can't it's not too much of a hassle.

thanks for the support guys

Really glad you finally got there and I hope EasyBCD works for you. As I said, I could make it work only if I put Grub on the Linux partition, not on the MBR. I think I learnt a lot from this thread, mainly, how lucky I am not to have Windows 8!