Hi Craig, A few weeks ago we bought an ASUS R501 (aka N56 VM or VZ), which had Win8 preinstalled. (15.6" laptop with quad core i7, 8GB RAM, FullHD LED screen) After disabling secure boot, I was able to boot from USB (Ubuntu Qantal 12.10 64bit) and install that on to the HD by having the installer resize one of the two NTFS partitions. NB the resulting setup won't dual boot. If I keep secure boot disabled, GNU/Linux boots and works perfectly - if I enable secure boot, Win8 can be started. No matter, as the Win8 is not used. We might wipe it altogether at some point. It's possible that the Debian USB stick boot setup is a bit different - perhaps just put Ubuntu on a stick, even just to see if it that boots. My stick was initialised with the "Startup Disk Creator" which is in Ubuntu's System/administration menu. It's a normal FAT32 8GB USB stick, which also has other data on it - all the tool does is copy/replace the directories for the Ubuntu live/install, and make the stick bootable. No other partitions are created. Cheers, Arjen. -- Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com) MySQL services Sane business strategy explorations at http://upstarta.com.au Personal blog at http://lentz.com.au/blog/