Sorry, I see it now.

Strange how extremely simple the H version is compared to X. Almost as simple as the one I have on my laptop...

Yeah I know; these whipper-snappers with their fancy telephone gizmos and whatsits. Whatever happened to good old paper books? ;)

It needs to be plugged into the back? I've been using my front USB ports because it was just more convenient since my back ones are under the desk and already filled with plugs from about 12 joysticks and gamepads (and a keyboard and 2 mice).

Actually, several don't always like it so it's best to use the ones in the back (via extension cord and/or powered USB hub).

BIOS/UEFI is limited, and depending on several factors, some mamaboards don't have properly access to those in the front, while Windows/Linux do because of extended chipset/USB drivers.

Oh now I find this out. Well, it's still better than my other computer which can't boot from USB at all, and about 80% of the ports don't even seem to be recognized in Windows (at one point I had to unplug the keyboard to use the mouse instead!).

Yup! ASUS disappoints once again. They used to be a seriously good brand, now they're just a well known brand and more about branding than good engineering... not much different from all the others. As with most consumer hardware, both firmware and documentation tends to be rushed and incomplete and often contain errors. :< Pretty much, yeah. That option should not be needed once you have a proper UEFI bootloader installed, but it might be needed in the first phase where you first install the system with a legacy bootloader and reboot. (Of course, if you're doing everything manually, then you should be able to install both at once without an intervening reboot; I don't know if there's a way to coerce Mint's installer to let you do both at once) The idea (following the hybrid install tutorial) was to first install the system with the legacy bootloader, then boot into the new system and install the UEFI loader too. Without CSM you won't be able to boot into the new system. So yes initially that option must be toggled on, but then you install the UEFI loader and it should no longer be required.

Either way, no option in BIOS can change what sort of installation can be performed (remember, bootloaders too are just bytes on disk.. if you can write bytes, you can write a bootloader that supports either mode).

FWIW my board does support booting from the front USB ports too. In the photos I showed earlier, I have that KingstonDT Hyper-X USB stick on a front panel USB 3 port.

But sanscript is right in that the firmware doesn't necessarily have (correctly working) drivers set up to handle all the chips and slots on your board, and that could include the chip that runs your front USB ports. Back panel ports tend to be the safest bet, but depending on how many there are, some of these too could be driven by different hubs or host controllers.

Yes. The BIOS have always been a little behind on supporting those properly, especially USB3.x on cheap mamaboards (and poor chipsets).

Bastards. Companies should always try to make the best product that they reasonably can.

Well it's not a big deal. I've done enough work on this that what's one extra reboot? The main concern is that I get it working.

Yeah, that's what I thought. So it sounds like max compatibility. Great.

That's what I would think too. I mean, I can write whatever bytes I want regardless of whatever mode I'm using, but then I guess booting it's a different issue.

Well I could try a back port. The funny thing is though, I can boot the installer from the front port, so I would think that it could boot anything from there, but I might be wrong.

Well that's a problem.

What options do you see in the ASUS UEFI/bios under the boot tab? Is there an override part with DVD/USB/other HDD entries, in addition to youn normal boot order/pioritities?

Screenshots might be useful here.

It's possible that you cannot see it at all due to the aforementioned Fast boot/secure boot/csm legacy settings, so you might wanna play around with those.

By the way, how can you even boot from the live USB to install Mint, if there is no setting in the bios in boot order priority for USB? *oh wait* you do it manually through Windows, I remember now, it accesses the boot menu (which button was that again , F8 for Asus?) for you.

The boot menu key might also be useful for temporary set ups.

That's completely wrong. UNetbootin or Rufus are to create live USB linux installers. So they are live, bootable linux distro ISOs for installation. You need to actually install the distro completely on a USB pen drive. THat's different.

If you need to create live USB for installation, then you can burn the ISO using Unetbootin or Rufus. Otherwise, don't use them.

Mine takes about 150mb I checked, but I've seen the number 550mb floating around. Up to you.

You can do it now or later during the installation.

Yes, use 'something else'. Yes, install the bootloader on to the USB drive. There is usually no need to specify the boot/efi partition, it just has to exist as FAT32 GPT with boot flag on partition.

No you don't have to. It's nice to separate the OS files from your 'personal' files though.

This should only happen if you install GRUB again on your HDD during the installation, otherwise if you don't even plugin the USB drive, why should your normal dual boot be affected. So make sure to install the bootloader on the USB drive during the USB installation.

No problem. ANd arsed means 'i can't be asked' mixed in with 'arse=ass' to signify more than your usual 'can't be asked' sentiment. Yeah. I'm doing a terrible job of explaining it, but it's just a saying, popular in the UK especially.

Until you're absolutely sure and til you get more comfortable with the process, you might as well experiment without having the internal HDD connected (unplug either the SATA or the power cable) just to be sure. And then just plug it in again when your're finished or when you feel you have control over it.

I used to do it myself if there was something unfamiliar, but I always do it when I nuke harddrives because it's human to sometimes make errors, even with the best of intentions :)

sanscript, everyone keeps telling me to unplug my HD while booting, but I'm telling you that I can't. First of all, unless I can get the booting from BIOS working I'm going to have to keep booting while restarting from Windows 10, which is on the HD, which means that if I wanted to unplug the HD I'd have to do it while the computer is running, and I'm not doing that! Also, I'm great with software but terrible with hardware, and I'm not sure I'd trust myself to properly disassemble interior parts of a computer and then reassemble them, and for that matter, I'm not even sure where there's a screwdriver.

I'd have to get back to you about that, but I'm not sure how I could get you a screenshot. I know the information that's displayed is very minimal though.

I don't think I'm using fast boot, and I know I'm not using secure boot, and I've turned CSM on and back off again (by the way, why would turning it on make fonts bigger when starting up, bu then they stay big even when I turn it back off again?). I'm not entirely sure that I have a boot menu key, because it doesn't mention it on the screen or in the manual, but I'll try F8 next time, just in case that works.

Oh! I already burned it using Rufus a long time ago. I must have really misread or misinterpreted the information about Unetbootin!

Hmm, that seems like a hell of a lot of space for that to use (but so does 150 MB, actually), but who cares? On a 16 GB drive where I really only need 8, what's an extra 600 MB?

Alright, that sounds pretty much like the instructions that I've been using (but I'd have to double-check).

Actually, you may not know this, because I don't know if you've used Mint before, but there's supposedly a bug in the installer which causes it to mess up the GRUB on the HD whenever you install Mint onto a USB stick if it's already installed on the HD as well, even if you install GRUB on the USB instead of the HD so that theoretically it shouldn't touch the HD at all. I know, it's a really stupid bug and I have no idea why it happens.

I've plugged a USB 3.0 stick into a USB 3.0 port (on the back of the PC), tried accessing the boot menu with F8 (which does work by the way) and also gone back into the UEFI and here's what I've found:

On the boot menu I get three options that all refer to the hard drive - one for booting Windows, one for Ubuntu (which is Mint, but actually it runs GRUB) and one that just refers to the HD in general (I don't know what that does but it seems redundant). There's also an option to boot from a DVD, and another option called PMAP, which looks like it's slightly indented as though there's a space before it. In any case, these options show the size corresponding to the drive, and the PMAP is 7.9 GB (which corresponds to the size of the 8 GB USB stick that I had plugged in at the time). However, when I try to boot that I get this message:

Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in Selected Boot device and press a key.

If I press a key it just repeats the message. Then I went back into UEFI and looked around. On the Advanced tab, down near the bottom I found a USB Configuration option, which showed another screen that said Legacy USB Support is Enabled, XHCI Hand-off is Enabled and PMAP is set to Auto. Also on that screen there was a button for USB Single Port Control, which then showed another screen with U32G1_1 through U32G1_8 and also USB_E1234, which are all Enabled.

Then in the Boot tab, I went into the Secure Boot screen, and the Secure Boot state is set as Other OS, which I think means off (the only alternative option is Windows UEFI mode, which I guess means on). Is this correct? Anyway, also from the Boot tab, I went into the Fast Boot screen, and it was Enabled but I set it to Disabled, and then I also went into the CSM screen and found that Launch CSM is Enabled, which is really weird because I'm certain that I had disabled it before, after I had initially enabled it when I was trying to install Linux on the USB! It had given me a warning when I tried to disable it, which said:

Notice: Due to Microsoft Secure Boot regulations, ensure the Microsoft signed UEFI driver is contained in the plugged PCI-E based storages including M.2 SSD before set the Launch CSM to [Disabled]. Otherwise the PCI-E based storages will be only available for the data drive usage. Contact the PCI-E storage vendor for the UEFI driver availability details.

Well I wasn't certain what all that had meant, but I don't even have any SSD, and it started out Disabled, and I haven't changed any hardware since I had first gotten the PC, so I figured that if I set it to Enabled then I should be able to set it back to Disabled later just as easily, right? When I had set it to Disabled I didn't get any kind of error, so I had assumed that it worked. Am I wrong?

Anyway, this time I just left it as Enabled, since that's what I'll need for the first part of installing it on a USB 3.0 stick. Then I saved (the only thing that I had changed this time was that I had disabled the Fast Boot) and then went back into the boot menu to try to boot from the USB again, and got the same error as before. I'm certain that I had the drive plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the back, and that it contains a bootable version of Linux (I had installed it as such, and I'm able to boot into it through the GRUB on the HD, but it recognizes it as Mint).

Here's the latest update: just as an experiment I tried booting the installer USB from the boot menu, and in addition to the PMAP option it gave me an extra option that said something like "PMAP Partition 1 UEFI mode", so I chose that one and it booted! Of course, that drive has always been able to boot more easily than others, but why would it give me the extra option for that one and not for the installed version that I had made? How exactly can I get an installed version to have GRUB and anything else used for booting to be set up EXACTLY the same way as the installer has it?

Anyway, after that, I did the partitioning on the new USB 3.1 drive and installed it the way that I'm supposed to(it took about an hour, which is a lot less than the 4 hours it took for USB 2.0, but it still seem longer than it used to be, though I'm not sure why), but I haven't rebooted into it yet to put in the UEFI settings and test it. I thought I'd come here to post this first, and also fix the GRUB that was inevitably corrupted (I'm in the HD Linux now). But now it's time to go back and finish the job.

Probably because you didn't install the UEFI bootloader yet?

Oh is that what does it? Well that makes sense now.

In any case, I'm booted into the new one, so obviously I have the WiFi driver installed on it, but it seems to run VERY slowly. It needs to run quicker than this because it's very slow... usually, though at the moment that I'm typing this it seems to be fine, but that may be just because I'm not taxing it. Though I'm looking at the resource monitor and all 16 processors are using between about 5% and 20% just to do this. But it took forever just to show the login screen, forever to open a folder, and forever to display icons on the desktop and the menu. I don't know what's going on.

For some reason it made a "Filesystem" and also a "Filesystem root" which are both identical (same files and size), but it didn't automatically mount my HD (though I mounted it manually) but if I would need to do that in another computer then that can't work, because I'm going to give copies of this to laymen and they don't know how to mount drives, so it needs to happen automatically, like it did when I previously installed Linux on a USB drive without making extra partitions (these other people won't need to do anything complicated - just run one single program). Even when I manually mounted the drives they still don't show on the left side of the window, which is where they usually automatically appear and it's much more convenient, especially for laymen.

And it also put this weird file in the home folder which is just called "j", but I opened it as a text document in Xed, and it says "MOUNT(8) System Administration MOUNT(8)" at the top, and then explains a lot of stuff, half the time putting a weird character between each letter which looks like 4 tiny characters in a box. I don't know what that file's about.

I'll try to finish the rest of the setup for UEFI now, but I hope I'm not slowed down too much.

Well I can't seem to install GParted because when I open the Software Manager, and wait for like 10 minutes, it keeps grinding away and loading and not displaying anything, and my Resource Monitor says that it's using about 50% of the power on all 16 processors. As soon as I close the Software Manager, it shoots down to like between 5% and 10%.

It even took like 5 minutes for the window to display to let me change the date/time settings (which I consider ironic).