I have an Asus EE 1000 which I have previously had with Ubuntu and then XP systems. I had installed Mint but wanted to try out Win 10 so tried to load my Win 7 disc to upgrade it to 10. That wouldn't work for some reason so I re-installed XP and tried to go to Win 7 again from there. That failed, too. I am now trying to re-install Mint 16 or 17 from an external dvd drive (as I did previously) but, no matter what I do to the F2 boot select option, the damn laptop just keeps coming back up in XP. I have also tried with the Universal USB installer, but that doesn't seem to be recognised either.

I did need to do some messing with the partitions when I re-installed XP, otherwise it just would not start that installation process.

Anyone have any pointers?

Cheers.

Maybe try building a bootable USB drive with Rufus?

What error message is Windows 7 giving you?

Does it happen to be about BIOS/EUFI or MBR/GPT? If so, as Chicog said.

I've given up with Win 7 and just plan on re-installing Mint, this is just a spare laptop so I'm not too bothered about it. I have tried the Universal UsbI bootable idea and the drive does not get recognised.

I might just do a "format C" and see what happens:)

You might try using a different application to write the ISO image to the USB stick. Unless the ISO is written as a disk image it is not going to boot.

Try this application called UNetbootin to write the image: https://unetbootin.github.io/

I have not had an image fail using this application.