Eee PC 1025C will not boot from USB w/ Mint 17 Xfce iso
 

I'm pretty new to Linux, however I have run Ubuntu 10 on a Dell laptop in dual boot configuration with Windows XP. I successfully setup partitions and installed both OS's.

However, now I'm working with an ASUS Eee PC 1025C. I had Windows 7 Starter edition but it got corrupted and would not load so I figured I would take the opportunity to start playing with Linux. I chose Mint 17 Xfce and created a bootable USB flash drive with the Mint 17 Xfce iso. When I set the bios to boot from the USB first and then restart the netbook I get an error message:

BOOTMGR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

I even made a simple FreeDOS bootable flash drive and got the same error. Thinking that my USB flash drive was not setup to boot correctly, I tried it on my Dell laptop. I set the boot order to boot from the USB port and it successfully booted to Mint. I even tried the FreeDOS bootable USB that I made. It worked in my laptop also.

Going back to my Eee PC, knowing that the USB flash drive is in fact bootable, I checked all of my cables, bios settings, and tried again. Same BOOTMGR is missing error.

Some background on what I've done thus far. Since windows was corrupted, probably a driver or something, I took the hard drive out and connected it to my laptop via an external SATA interface to USB adapter. I noticed that the hard drive from my Eee PC had two partitions, one was empty and the other had all of the Windows system files and my personal files. So I reformatted both partitions, they were NTFS already so that's how I left them. After reformatting both partitions they were both blank, no files left.

I reinstalled the hard drive into the Eee PC and attempted to boot from the USB flash drive, that's when I got the error listed above. I even tried to copy the ISO files from my bootable USB flash drive to the hard drive and let it boot from the hard drive... same error again.

What am I doing wrong? Thanks for your help.

Make certain the usb you want to boot into is plugged in before you turn on the PC and enter the BIOS
I've found that on most machines it shows up in the boot order as a separate option to "boot from usb"
You have to select that option explicitly or it defaults to trying to boot from the internal hard drive. (or SSD as the case may be)

To successfully make a bootable usb you need to bit-copy the .iso to the entire usb. With windows you can do this using win32diskimager and in Linux you can use dd

Be careful with dd though as it can easily wipe out any drive connected to your PC

The command will look something similar to this;
This is assuming you're in the same directory as the .iso file and that the usb drive you want to write to is /dev/sdb it might also be /dev/sdc or something entirely different.

The error you are getting is because it is still trying to boot from the hard drive which has no operating system. When you boot the computer with the flash drive plugged in, do you see the flash drive in the BIOS, is it recognized? Check all the options. Do you have multiple USB ports on the machine? Some of these notebooks will have multiple ports but will only boot from one of them so try it in different ports if you have them.

OK... I figured it out. Sneaky BIOS!!
When I turn on the Eee PC (USB flash drive installed) the BIOS recognizes that it's there. It shows up in the Boot Priority list as Boot Option #2. So, I select Boot Option #1 and make the USB flash drive the first option. At this point I press F10 to save and exit. The computer restarts and I get the same error. I did this dozens of times and same result.

Here's where I figured it out...
On the Boot Tab right under Boot Option #1 and Boot Option #2 it has "Hard Drive BBS Priorities". I have no idea what that means, I never even thought to select it and investigate. When I arrow down to highlight the Boot Option #1 or #2 lines, the notes to the right state, "Sets the system boot order". With that information in hand, I figured moving the USB flash drive to the #1 slot would do the trick.
When I highlighted the Hard Drive BBS Priorities the notes to the rights state "Set the order of the legacy devices in this group". When I press enter I'm presented with two more boot options just like the previous screen. However the USB is listed differently.

On the main Boot screen the USB is listed as "UEFI: ScanDisk Cruzer Glide 2.01". However, in the legacy device screen it's listed as "ScanDisk Cruzer Glide 2.01".

I did some research about what UEFI is and see that it was to replace BIOS, since the netbook uses a BIOS then choosing to boot from a UEFI device was not working... I needed to set the legacy boot order for use with the BIOS. So, once I set the USB to option #1 in the legacy group, it booted into Mint from the USB.

For anyone reading this with a similar problem, here is a bit of info.
Eee PC 1025C using the Atom N2600 Processor with 1GB RAM
ASUS EeePC ACPI BIOS
Version 0701
Build Date 1/6/2012
EC Firmware Version EPCE-021

Thanks for all your help guys... consider this thread solved. :-)