Unfortunately I still was not able to boot from the USB. I switched to a 2GB '24x' PNY Attache I had lying around, with no embedded U3 partition, and it showed up immediately when I had any EFI-supporting image copied to it. (Once it appeared in F9 menu, only after I had removed it during boot.) I was using a U3 16GB stick that never had problems booting on any BIOS-based computer, and I could never get it to show up reliably in the boot menu.

Lots of good advice, but none of it (would have) helped me! I just had this same problem with exactly the same symptoms on an ASUS K56CA that I unboxed yesterday, and boy I am glad I did not come to this thread first. You do need to have them plugged in on boot (as it happens so fast), but messing around with the boot order as I mentioned previously became unnecessary.Īs always, YMMV - this worked for me, I hope it helps you. Note: Disabling secure boot also meant that I had no issues at all getting both a USB and USB CD-ROM to appear in the boot menu on startup (hitting ESC). This page here: was the best help I found. Ubuntu installed and all was well with the world once more. Once I did this, it was pretty smooth sailing. What I needed to do was turn off the 'Secure Boot' option in UEFI/BIOS.

Next time you want to bot from USB (or a USB DVD, whatever), you'll need to do this again.ĮDIT 12-12-12: OK, I managed to get this working with Ubuntu. Last note: Once you remove the USB stick, it will disappear from the options. I tried to boot onto an Ubuntu USB - I see the grub loader but nothing happens after that. However, if you plug in the USB stick before you boot, the choice will turn up. There are tutorials on how to do this on the net, the one I used was here: inf files) and use dism.exe to load these into a windows boot image. You need to download the USB3 drivers from asus, extract the driver files (from the folder containing the. To get around this you need to create a customized windows setup, on either a USB memory stick or a DVD. This is because the bios loads the windows boot image, but when the windows setup program starts it doesn't have USB3 drivers and can't read the setup files. If you are trying to install windows 7 on a USB3 only zenbook, your next headache will be windows setup failing, from either a bootable USB memory stick or a USB DVD drive. To enable booting to a USB device you need to set secure boot to disabled (in the security tab of the bios) and enable CSM (on the boot tab of the bios)

We just got a few of these in at work and they are a right PITA to wipe and clean-install windows with, especially the usb-3 only ones.

Asus sonicmaster boot menu