How to boot from USB on my Asus T101HA

Solution 1:

Asus T100 is Intel Bay Trail device and most of those, despite having a 64bit CPU, have IA32 (32bit) EFI firmware. Also feature called Secure Boot is enabled in EFI setup by default and that might block some operating systems from showing up in boot menu. In order to make firmware recognize flash-drive as bootable it needs to be formatted as FAT32 and have signed 32bit operating system loader in EFI/bootia32.efi.

You do not mention which 2nd operating system you are trying to boot so I can only assume it's a Linux distribution. It probably does not show up in menu because:

• SecureBoot is enabled and EFI/bootia32.efi is not signed by valid key - easiest is to disable SecureBoot in EFI setup (there should be a toggle). Beware that some Windows 10 features (e.g. BitLocker) don't work in that state.

• 32bit EFI loader is not present on flash-drive at all (this applies for most 64bit Linux distribution Live USBs - e.g. Ubuntu). In that case you will need to compile GRUB for 32bit EFI and place it to proper directory (and also disable SecureBoot, obviously). For Ubuntu, there are ISOs already prepared. You can find them here: http://linuxiumcomau.blogspot.com/2016/10/running-ubuntu-on-intel-bay-trail-and.html (NOTE: those are not official Ubuntu images, have patched kernel to support specific hardware and are not officially supported in any way - please read the information on that page before trying them out.)

This page might give you some hints on getting Linux running on your device (if Linux is case): http://www.jfwhome.com/2014/03/07/perfect-ubuntu-or-other-linux-on-the-asus-transformer-book-t100/

Solution 2:

I've installed Linux (Debian) in a T102H, your problem is related to UEFI in this kind of devices.

Before this I:

• Formated the pendrive
• deleted all partitions
• Mounted the pendrive as /mnt/debian
• Downloaded a debian iso

This is simple to solve just "unzipping" the iso into the pendrive:

 7z x debian.iso -o/mnt/debian

And you need to flag the partition as bootable:

parted /dev/sdX set 1 boot on

I've followed those steps and worked like a charm, check out the original answer.

Also I've wrote an article in my blog about the install and configuration process of an Asus T101HA