Laptop won't boot from anything except HDD

I have a Windows 7 install disc (official,etc), I tried this in a laptop which would not boot to Windows 7, instead getting stuck on "the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible", the error code being 0xc000000f

I tried putting the disc into the drive and booting from that, but it kept asking me to put a disk in the drive and press any key (the drive span up, then down and then the message appeared), I tried with 3 other different install discs and a live disc of Ubuntu, same result. I then got told that often the CD drive doesn't work.

So on a separate computer I made a bootable USB stick from the install disc. Which worked well when booting on this other computer. But when I put it in the laptop it, and selected a the USB stick from the boot selection menu, it just showed an underscore, pressing any key did nothing.

What causes a laptop (Asus N53J) just to not boot from a USB stick? It supports booting from USB sticks, just literally does nothing when it is selected?

(I can boot to some asus recovery mode by pressing F9, but only learnt of this after about 3 hours)