Why does 14 Nadia boot but not LMDE?

[upcycler]

New HP Pavilion g7 notebook pc (64-bit) with Windows 8 pre-installed. Could not get LMDE to boot at all but Linux Mint 14 Nadia would boot.
Downloaded LDME 201204 Mate/Cinnamon 64bit via torrent and followed the user guide (http://www.linuxmint.com/documentation.php). I downloaded md5sum, checked that the ISO file signature was correct, and burned the disc image first to a dvd (using Infrarecoder). On reboot I changed the drive order in BIOS and disabled the Boot Security. On restart it just booted directly into windows. I deleted everything and tried again, this time to a USB flash drive (using unetbootin), changed the drive order etc. On restart it goes right into windows. I re-downloaded & did this twice, checked the md5sum number and the BIOS settings each time, could never get it to boot, always went right to windows. Then I deleted everything and downloaded Linux Mint 14 "Nadia" (blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2216) to the USB drive. This time on restart it did come up and got to the desktop, but it shut off the wireless and I have not been able to get the wireless connection back, so that's no good either, but at least it boots. Why?

[passerby]

It could be that the LMDE kernel doesn't support your hardware. In my case, kernel 3.2 doesn't work, but 3.5 onwards do.
Have you tried Maya? If Nadia works but Maya and LMDE don't, that could be the case.

[cwwgateway]

I could see it not booting and giving some error, but I don't think it had a chance to boot (or fail to boot) the kernel. Unfortunately, most new windows laptops (so most new laptops in general) come with secure boot and UEFI, which I have no experience with and which introduces many new quirks, especially considering the age of the LMDE ISOs (they were released long before Windows Eight). From the Mint 14 Live-USB/CD, could you run the following command in the terminal and post the output:

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inxi -F