Okay. So I got myself a Mint install and boots nicely.

This really isn't as hard as the past 3 and a half days I've spent pulling my hair out about.

First, the manufacturers like ASUS should not be blamed for this as I initially thought. Although I'm not sure they can be completely free from complicity to the complications that I endured. To my pleasure, as for the installation partitioning, the extra SSD drive was completely free for my installation where it may have been better anyways. There is the original DATA partition used by windows which takes up 400 gigs on the HDD, and which I am thinking of adding to my fstab so that I may just use that and not have to worry about any slicing and dicing in that regards. I think that will be fine.

So as implied earlier, the install was no problem once the CD booted. As described earlier, I went ahead and installed to the SSD drive. I tried doing a USB install with another OS, but problems with that OS caused me to go back the the Live CD and stay on that course.

As for the boot loader, I was still hazy about all the details, and because I did not yet want to "botch" anything as this is all new, I decided to have the installer install the boot loader in the same partition as the OS and I would later deal with that manually. I am still not sure whether or not the boot loader will install properly and allow a proper boot into the OS after installation. However, I will discuss what I did to make the OS boot properly.

***
EDIT:
Actually, it doesn't matter where the boot loader is installed if you follow the instructions below because you are going to re-install it anyways.
***

First off, I basically just used this post HERE at http://crunchbang.org, and did slight modifications.

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#You need to find out where your UEFI boot installation partition is. It should be /sda/1. If for some reason it is different, replace /sda/1 with your UEFI boot partition.
#Also, this tutorial uses /sda/8 as the OS installed partition. You need to replace /sda/8 and /media/sda8 with your installation partition.

#Boot into the same Live CD that you used for your installation.

sudo su

TARGET=/media/sda8 # replace sda8 with the location of your installation
mkdir -p $TARGET
mount /dev/sda8 $TARGET
for f in proc sys dev ; do mount --bind /$f $TARGET/$f ; done
mount --bind /dev/pts $TARGET/dev/pts # this step for good measure

# You may skip this next step in Mint. Maybe Ubuntu as well.
sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf $TARGET/etc/resolv.conf # needed to have network in chroot


sudo chroot $TARGET /bin/bash

apt-get update
apt-get install grub-efi-amd64
grub-install
update-grub

# now copy the grub.efi file that grub created to your efi partition

mkdir -p /media/efi_part
mount /dev/sda1 /media/efi_part # replace sda1 with your EFI partition name
mkdir /media/efi_part/EFI/mint/ # replace with a distro alias name here
cp /boot/grub/grub.efi /media/efi_part/EFI/mint/

umount /dev/sda1
CTRL+D

umount $TARGET/proc
umount $TARGET/sys
umount $TARGET/dev/pts
umount $TARGET/dev
umount $TARGET

CTRL+D

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Okay so really, as mentioned earlier, this is just a re-hash of the link provided above form crunchbang. Please go to that link and go down to 4) to continue as there are some more steps using your USB flash drive. You need to download the UEFI Shell.efi file. I tried earlier to put the file in the EFI partition as described by another tutorial, but unfortunately for some reason or another, that didn't work as I was unable to boot into the UEFI shell without any boot media. Putting the Shell.efi file on the flash drive as explained in the linked tutorial above did work. Just remember to change the file name to bootx64.efi.

cp Shell.exi [USB DRIVE]/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi

As an example, in my USB, the file and path is:
EFI/boot/bootx64.efi

Now reboot your computer, hit F2 (for ASUS) or whatever your manufacturer has it as, usually F10 or F12 or whatever. But if you're this far, I'm sure you've already got that figured out.

Select "Launch EFI Shell form filesystem device" and write the following in the shell:

Now reboot and enjoy.

Note this requires Secure Boot disabled (Not tested with secure boot enabled) and be sure to boot back into BIOS and make sure Mint GRUB2 (or whatever selection you made) is first in boot option order.

I may try doing Secure boot later and may require a shim as explained in previous posts.

Hi,

Sorry for this somewhat off-topic post, but I think you could help me; I'm considering buying a new laptop and I guess all the newer ones have the same problem described here; I'm not interested in keeping Windows (I want to just thwrow it and replace it with Linux); should I have to follow all the procedures detailed above to do that or the installation will be simpler?

Thanks in advance!

I believe you will still need the first partition open for the EFI.

To my understanding, most laptops make it easier to boot into your live cd or usb after disabling the Secure Boot option. But you may want to find the Legacy option and enable that too if you can, than reboot after install to see if that works off the bat.

If not, you may have to re-boot into your Live CD or USB after install and follow the directions above. But it's really not as hard as it appears.

I have replaced my Mint since then with Ubuntu since I am using it for courses and study and it is just easier with Ubuntu since Instructors use that as the Linux alternative and will have less dependency problems and hacking issues that I have no time for. That actually went smoothly. I didn't have to do any extra work, just like the "old days". However it was on the same partition. I haven't tested on a different patition yet.

Also, I have even enabled secure boot and everything works fine as well.


ADDED:
Also, I should add that I noticed that Ubuntu's installer had an EFI option for partitioning under types. So if you wipe out windows, that may be an option for you to pick.

I actually didn't even pick that since it was already there and I was just going to do a wait and see approach. However, I did back up the first partition and had the installer install Grub there. Everything worked out fine for me, but like I said, I already went through the steps above with my earlier installation.

Just to answer on the UEFI boot part. Fedora has decided to be UEFI compatible. This means Fedora distributions will be signed by Microsoft keys starting with Fedora 18 (January 2013).
Fedora 18 beta which is already available for install may already have this.

Please see: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/16863.html for an interesting post on this (September 2012)

Replace 'UEFI' with 'Secure Boot' and your statement is correct.

Got Linux Mint 17.1 to boot from USB on such an ASUS laptop.
 

1. The BIOS boot loader does not display OSs that it does not find. Such, a bootable OS has to have been inserted (DVD) or plugged in (USB) before entering the BIOS or boot loader. (The BIOS also lists under the boot menu section bootable OSs it found.)
2. CSM has to be enabled (and secure boot disabled as already mentioned in this thread). This is important because for example in my case, the boot loader listed my USB Mint under an UEFI entry when CSM was disabled. Selecting it did not boot it. But when I enabled CSM and under it Launch PXE OpROM, the boot loader listed USB Mint under UEFI and EFI. Selecting EFI finally booted Mint.

I posting this here in a thread that has become inactive because I think these BIOS settings are relevant for many other laptops, also newer ones. (I had similar problems to make my Lenovo G50 boot Mint from USB.)

can't boot from cd rom
 

what i found on the Asus with windows 8 i went into the bios and disabled the Secure boot and was able to boot with other devices installed the HD with One Already had win 7 and it Load Like new