Thanks Ubbe and Jan,
I have a recently purchased and licensed copy of W7 Home Premium on DVD that I used to make the Flash Drive copy.. I guess the problem could be a bad SSD, because the error occurs at about the point where W7 files would start being copied to the SSD. One thing I don't understand is why the D54 BIOS does not recognize that the Samsung external Optical Drive is plugged into one of the USB 3.0 ports and show it as a Boot Device.. All USB ports show as enabled in the BIOS and the mouse and keyboard I have plugged in work fine. I think I recall reading that there were some problems with the USB 3.0 ports on the NUC having problems dealing with USB 2.0 devices.