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It seems that my computer will only boot from USB if it's a CentOS bootable USB (more information on the image I used at the end of my post). I've tried a few weeks ago to install linux, so I took an ISO of CentOS and made a bootable usb with it. I booted into it quite easily, installed CentOS and was ready to use. CentOS was horribly laggy (the computer was practically useless) so I reinstalled W10 to download another distro and install it (please don't get stuck on the laggy part the problem doesn't lie there). The problem is that whatever distro I burn into my USB (I've tried Rufus, Etcher, win32diskimager, and even the disk manager in CentOS), when I boot from my USB key, the computer freezes on a black screen with a white line at the top left (a really short one, i'll provide a picture at the end of my post).

After some research I found out that my computer has a 64bits UEFI bios, i've disabled secure boot, fast boot everything like that. The USB key does appear in the bootloader menu. I've also tried booting from the EFI shell environnement and it just freezes again with a white line (I suppose it's an underscore).

So I've been looking for a solution for quite some time now and I've found out that the efi directory of CentOS and other distros are quite different. CentOS has multiple .efi files (for 32 bits AND 64 bits) and also a grub.cfg file in the EFI/BOOT directory whereas other distros have only grubx64.efi and bootx64.efi files.

I've also tried using the win32 loader in the debian iso, and it didn't work because when I try boot into the installer It says that g2ldr.mbr is missing and thus doesn't boot into the installer.

If there is any other information you need please ask.

Thanks for any kind of help you can provide.

Infos: -I've tried booting from a GPT partitionned USB key and also MBR partitionned USB key, didn't work -The CentOS image that works is : CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1708 -https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WUmpEW6khNI/maxresdefault.jpg This is what I get (focus only on the black parts as I don't try to do this operation in a virtual machine) except that there isn't even a mouse or anything. -https://ibb.co/ndTswS This is what the EFI directory looks like in CentOS

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I did it !

I managed to boot into a bootable USB key containing the image of debian (version : debian-9.3.0-amd64-netinst

Here is what I did :

I extracted the files of the debian image into a new folder. Then I moved the .efi files from the EFI/BOOT folder from the CentOS image and put them inside the efi/boot/ folder inside the previous folder. Then I took all the files contained in the boot/grub/ folder and put them inside the efi/boot/ folder (Be careful though, the image contains two folders named boot. One of them is at the root of the image and is called boot and contains only one folder named "grub" the other one is inside the efi folder which is in the root of the image).

If someone else has the same problem and didn't understand how I did it, just send me a message I'll try to help.

Sorry for my english.

PS : I didn't complete the installation as I haven't made a backup of my current system, but the graphical installation went quite fine (I stopped before the partitioning).

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    Alright so I did a full install of debian. And It didn't work. I mean the installation went fine but I can't boot into debian I get the same screen as in my original post with the frozen underscore/white line at the top left. I've looked into the EFI/BOOT folder of my harddrive (where i've installed debian) and there is only a bootx64.efi file Nothing else (no grub.cfg). I guess that my computer doesn't look at the right place so it doesn't find any grub.cfg files.
    – Oxyrz
    Commented Feb 15, 2018 at 21:02

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