First, make sure your USB is good by downloading, and then creating the LiveUSB, making sure to follow these directions;
http://vsido.org/index.php?topic=10.msg14#msg14It sounds as if you've already successfully gotten this far! Going through with what I've written below, will ENSURE that you've disabled and irretrievably lost the ability to boot your system in UEFI/Secure Boot mode, and unless you have a good recovery DVD or backup of some kind, you will not easily be able to fix this. (if at all!!! So do the following at your own risk. You've stated you work in an IT dept. so this is "assuming" your knowledge level is probably higher than someone who just bought a Best Buy laptop and is trying Linux for the first time)
Once your sure you've got a good downloaded ISO that is properly dd'd to the USB, I would Live boot and use the gparted tool that comes with the VSIDO installer to totally rebuild the hdd or ssd your going to install VSIDO on. By this, I mean deleting all partitions, creating a new disk using the default setting (msdos) and not GPT. This will make life much simpler and the only drawback to the msdos partitioning scheme, is the 2 TB limit to hdd's. GPT allows for much larger drives. (Only real benefit of it I know of) Yes there are more such as specific block alignment stuff and things that are beyond the scope of this 'hopefully', helpful post.
I would then create three (3) new partitions, one for root (/), and one for home (/home), and one for your swap partition. I usually allow 20 Gb's for the root drive, (though this is huge overkill, I have the space, and I know I'll never fill the root directory by making it this large. I would say a minimum size of 5Gb's for root (/) and if you have the space, at least 10Gb) and using the rest of the drive space for /home and swap. Personally, my feeling on swap is, if you have 8Gb's or more of RAM, the swap is NOT needed. If you do need to create a swap partition, (the VSIDO installer offers both ways, with swap or without swap) use your best judgment for how big you'd like it to be. At this point your physical hdd's/ssd's should be ready for a VSIDO full install. Make note that you can and should install swap to the hdd and not the ssd.
As to not being able to find the installed system at boot, make sure the correct disk is selected in your BIOS as the bootable disk. Other things to check in BIOS would be to insure that "Secure Boot" is disabled, and that the BIOS is set to "Legacy" mode, and not UEFI. (on some machines this is done by ENABLING the "CSM" feature in your BIOS) I'm not 100% certain, but I believe there are issues with a GPT partitioned hdd being 'seen' by Legacy enabled BIOS. (thus the instructions above to delete the current partitions and drives, and start over with the "Default" partition scheme which is msdos, and not GPT)
Remember this is written with me having to "assume" a lot of things about your system. I have successfully done a GPT install on an EFI enabled BIOS laptop. I would not recommend it to anyone at this point in time. If though, in your BIOS, it is trying to find the UEFI boot partition, this would be one reason it is not finding a bootable disk in your system, and why you would need to choose to enable booting in "Legacy" mode. The "Secure Boot" feature in BIOS is 'specifically' designed for booting UEFI/GPT systems and if it is enabled, the system will NOT boot.
Currently UEFI/Secure Boot mode is handled by a small FAT32 partition situated at the beginning of the first bootable drive in a system. In order for VSIDO to be installed, you must be sure you have overwritten this part of the hdd. (ssd) Otherwise, after a fresh install of VSIDO, on reboot your BIOS will first look at the beginning of the disk, see the FAT32 partition with the UEFI information on it, and conclude that there is no 'bootable' drive to start.
All of the above will definitely overwrite and destroy any MBR you have on your laptop! It WILL destroy any of the current OS's you have installed. VSIDO boots using Grub2. The VSIDO installer relies on Remastersys, which in turn depends upon Grub2. There is no getting around this at the time of this writing.
Another thing to note, your strict IT dept. allows 'some' of the bigger 'primary' Linux distros. This would definitely describe VSIDO, (as well as #!) as it is wholly built upon Debian, which to my knowledge is the biggest Linux of them all!
One more thing to note, during the install process it will ask you where you want to install Grub to. If what you've said above is true, then your laptop will ONLY have VSIDO installed, so when choosing where to install Grub2 to, choose the MBR selection.
If you need any further help just let us know. Good luck and I know you'll really enjoy VSIDO...