UEFI BIOS Option

[essenbe]

Hey Guys.
Essenbe is a lucky dog that has a motherboard with UEFI BIOS that the manufacturer included the beautiful GUI BIOS Settings.

My daughter's Asus laptop, and a few others I have seen, with a UEFI bios, has BIOS Settings that look just like legacy BIOS settings. No pretty screens, no mouse, just black and blue and white.

So there is no special key to get what Essenbe has, and it is definitely not Windows. That is what he gets when he turns on his computer. We get that old stuff. It's like I said: up to the manufacturer.

If anyone reading this has a LAPTOP with a GUI BIOS, one you can use a mouse in, please let us know. I have not seen one....yet. Just on desktop boards.

Well, I'm not a 'lucky dog', I paid dearly for it.

 

[theog]

How to install Windows 64 bit on a uEFI BIOS:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...e-firmware-interface-install-windows-7-a.html
or
UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) - Install Windows 8 with

Screenshots from Windows 8.

 

[TVeblen]

Well, I'm not a 'lucky dog', I paid dearly for it.

As I will be soon, my friend. As I will be doing soon.

 

[Cr00zng]

The UEFI interface for Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP5 TH with BIOS version F11:



The boot mode selection options are shown over the inteface.

The UEFI supports basic mouse operation, such as click and double click, but does not support the scroll wheel on my Logitec mouse. It's still nice to have the mouse in the BIOS.

The interface is nice to have, but the best feature of the UEFI is speed...

 

[Britton30]

Where is the recovery partition on your windows 7 install?

As far as I know, only OEM machines like your Toshiba have a Recovery Partition. This is a custom build and due to my using diskpart to partition and format the drive during install I also don't have the System Reserved, it is included as part of the C:\ partition.

Hey Gary, check out this EXCELLENT tutorial here :
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/244566-hard-drive-gpt-mbr.html

EXCELLENT indeed Bob, as I suspected my drives are MBR with UEFI being my only BIOS as is essenbe's board.



My UEFI overclocking screen.

 

[TVeblen]

One point I feel I need to make (sorry), regarding the thing that adds the most confusion to any discussion regarding UEFI, is that we need to separate the GUI from UEFI. They are not one in the same.

You can have an UEFI system without a Graphical User Interface.
But you can't have a GUI without UEFI (or the ESP).

 

[Rockit]

So let me see if I can get this straight.

Step one: Format SSD to GPT
Step two: Clone current operating system to SSD
Step three: Install SSD
Step four: Change bios to UEFI and boot.

Is this correct or do I have to do change the bios first .. boot from Windows 7 Dvd and do a fresh install?

Thank You

 

[TVeblen]

You must change the bios to UEFI first .. boot from Windows 7 Dvd ... and do a fresh install.

Follow the instructions in theogs post #22 for Windows 7 very carefully.

To have a disk that is all unallocated space (as per instructions) you will need to do a Clean All from Diskpart to wipe *everything* off your hard drive first. So be sure to make all your necessary backups!

If you want step by step for Diskpart or any other preparation just ask, you got a lot of experienced eyes here.

If you clone the drive you will only have the exact same setup you have now.... only on an SSD.

 

[Cr00zng]

EXCELLENT indeed Bob, as I suspected my drives are MBR with UEFI being my only BIOS as is essenbe's board.

All motherboards have a a single BIOS, even the ones with the UEFI interface.

Having the drives with MBR and boots with the UEFI BIOS means that the boot option is set to "Enable both..." under "UEFI/Legacy boot" settings. Asus does the same as Gigabyte, which is UEFI first and then legacy; Asus just name it differently, but it does the same.

 

[Rockit]

Oh Boy,

This means I have to contact Toshiba again and see if I can talk to someone about getting the correct application to re-install the most current and needed drivers without trying to navigate their website.

They have one utility for Windows 8 so I hope they also have one for Windows 7.

Thanks Again

 

[Britton30]

EXCELLENT indeed Bob, as I suspected my drives are MBR with UEFI being my only BIOS as is essenbe's board.

All motherboards have a a single BIOS, even the ones with the UEFI interface.

Having the drives with MBR and boots with the UEFI BIOS means that the boot option is set to "Enable both..." under "UEFI/Legacy boot" settings. Asus does the same as Gigabyte, which is UEFI first and then legacy; Asus just name it differently, but it does the same.

tell me where the setting is to change the type of boot mine does. I've not seen it. Gigabyte uses very different things than other soo, I've had one before.

 

[essenbe]

Gary, mine is under the boot tab.

 

[TVeblen]

To have a disk that is all unallocated space (as per instructions) you will need to do a Clean All from Diskpart to wipe *everything* off your hard drive first. So be sure to make all your necessary backups!

^This is wrong^ (Thanks Essenbe for pointing it out to me)
I forgot that you were going to install on a new SSD, which will be blank unallocated space already. Sorry

Do not use the Clean All command on an SSD. Ever. Bad Idea.
Spinners, yes.

 

[Cr00zng]

tell me where the setting is to change the type of boot mine does. I've not seen it. Gigabyte uses very different things than other soo, I've had one before.

Without knowing the UEFI settings for your motherboard, I cannot. If you cannot find it, maybe your motherboard does not have options for UEFI boot only. Maybe it has "UEFI first and then legacy" by default that cannot be changed.

With UEFI only boot option the system cannot boot an MBR partition, it needs a GPT partition to boot. Conversely, UEFI needs to boot the MBR partition by the legacy function. While both the MBR and GPT partitions have boot sectors, they are different and require the correct UEFI boot option. Otherwise, the OS will not boot.

The wording in the UEFI is different between motherboard manufacturer, for better or worse. In either case UEFI is a standard where the GUI/mouse is part of among others, such as booting GPT drives, load drivers, etc. Just because the motherboard has a UEFI interface doesn't necessarily means that all functionalities of the UEFI are in place. In theory it should, but it is a modular design after all...

 

[Britton30]

Gary, mine is under the boot tab.

View attachment 242944

Where Steve?

 

[essenbe]

Yours may be different or called something different. It's the last entry, CSM (Compatibility support module)

 

[Britton30]

Here are my entire boot screen options put together as one snip. Maybe this is a cheap board.

 

[TVeblen]

The thing we all need to keep in mind is that one of the main features of UEFI is that the Setup Program (formerly known as BIOS, but we keep using the term because what else do we have?) is configurable.

Manufacturers can add or remove features at will. So if Gigabyte wants to let you have a hybrid BIOS they can. If Asus thinks that is not necessary they can remove that module.

We old timers grew up with "the one BIOS", so we will be sure to have a hard time adjusting to "BIOS, The Next Generation". We've got to start thinking of the "BIOS" as the "Setup Program" and treat it the same way we do about any other class of software. Different software does the same thing differently.

 

[Cr00zng]

At the current time UEFI and BIOS names are interchangable, but will fade away with time. Having UEFI supporting many BIOS features doesn't help either, but technological advances will eliminate the need for backward compatibility.

Currently, all UEFI boards support BIOS features, some of them more than others. While Gigabyte calls theirs "UEFI DUAL BIOS", it isn't dual at all, nor is it BIOS. My motherboard has two "BIOS ROMs" as the marketing material calls it. They could've called it UEFI ROM for all practical purposes...

The UEFI DUAL BIOS actually one is active, while the other is backup ROM. The backup cannot boot the system; however, the end user can save UEFI settings in the backup. The system also backs up a number of last know successful boot configuration, similarly as Windows does. The difference is that the end user would need to load the saved UEFI settings from the backup to the active ROM, if needed to.

We old timers didn't grow up with one BIOS, it had gone through number of changes since the beginning. We'll just need get used of the UEFI acronym as the interface for managing computer hardware. It's an OS on its own, much more than the BIOS used to be...

This discussion on this subject certaily helped me to understand UEFI and through that, quite a few things about my new motherboard. Thanks guys...

 

[Cr00zng]

Here are my entire boot screen options put together as one snip. Maybe this is a cheap board.

It doesn't seem that your motherboard's boot options include UEFI boot options, but it is certainly not a cheap board. It natively support greater than 2.2 TBs drives with 64-bit OS and may or may not be able to boot GPT partitions.

The chances are that you will not need booting booting GPT partitions anytime soon. It'll take some time before everyone is getting greater than 2.2 TBs SSD drives....