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UEFI um...wuht?

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UnEducated and F'in Ignorant? (UEFI) because I don't understand wtf is going on with this Asus 77 board.

Normally, I boot my USB stick containing the Win7 installer and select a drive and wa-la. On this board, Windows installer doesn't detect the hdd. Typically I'd think it needs a SATA driver that 7 doesn't have so I switched the SATA mode from AHCI to IDE and the same thing happens.

Can someone explain UEFI and it's purpose? Is that what's causing this?
 

cadaveca

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Nope.

Got the Win7 USB plugged into a blue port? Try a black port. Just did this, no problems. If you use blue port, driver is needed for the USB3 that provides that port. Intel chipset doesn't need driver, MS ACHI driver works perfectly.


Actually, usually I use the white port for the Win7 USB, come to think of it. Same as the black ports, but ya never know.
 
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Seriously... I take it the blues are 3.0 but don't fallback to 2.0?
 

cadaveca

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Seriously... I take it the blues are 3.0 but don't fallback to 2.0?

Yep. They use external controllers built into the board, and need drivers in Windows, too. Windows7 came out before many of these controllers(including the one on the chipset, obviously), so drivers aren't on the disc images. The only board I had issues installing, because of a lack of USB2.0, was the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7.
 
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So how did it boot off USB 3.0 at all?
 

cadaveca

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So how did it boot off USB 3.0 at all?

Honestly...that's because UEFI allowed it to. This is where UEFI is better, since it offers more functionality, including drivers for USB3, so you can use keyboards and mice in BIOS. But, then Windows loads it's own crap for install, and doesn't recognize the UEFI fully.

I have yet to test USB 3.0 installs with Win8, but I'll be doing that as well.
 

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Ive never had issues installing windows 7 via USB 3.0,of course using Z77.
 
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To me their just overcomplicating things. What's the main benefit of UEFI?
 

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You mean the bios gui?
 

cadaveca

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To me their just overcomplicating things. What's the main benefit of UEFI?

as posted above, plus way faster boot times. WAY FASTER. No more waiting for external controllers to boot and all that.
 
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I think I boot my computer once a month. heh
 

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as posted above, plus way faster boot times. WAY FASTER. No more waiting for external controllers to boot and all that.

Don't forget better support for larger hard drives.
 
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Perhaps it would be possible to continue using UEFI's USB "drivers" by disabling "xHCI Hand-off" (or a similar option) from within UEFI before booting? I think I'll try this myself the next time I get the opportunity, but you could try it and see for yourself if it doesn't work :)
 

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UnEducated and F'in Ignorant? (UEFI) because I don't understand wtf is going on with this Asus 77 board.

Normally, I boot my USB stick containing the Win7 installer and select a drive and wa-la. On this board, Windows installer doesn't detect the hdd. Typically I'd think it needs a SATA driver that 7 doesn't have so I switched the SATA mode from AHCI to IDE and the same thing happens.

Can someone explain UEFI and it's purpose? Is that what's causing this?
You have to use UEFI boot method to get access to UEFI features. I don't know what it will show up as under Asus boards. When it comes to actually boot windows, you have to boot to the Windows Boot Manager device. If you do any booting that isn't explicitly to UEFI, you'll be running it off a legacy BIOS.


The primary benefit to using UEFI is that you can boot to HDDs with larger capacity than 2 TB.
 
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You have to use UEFI boot method to get access to UEFI features. I don't know what it will show up as under Asus boards. When it comes to actually boot windows, you have to boot to the Windows Boot Manager device. If you do any booting that isn't explicitly to UEFI, you'll be running it off a legacy BIOS.


The primary benefit to using UEFI is that you can boot to HDDs with larger capacity than 2 TB.

I "burned" a Windows 7 iso to USB stick with UltraISO. Whatever that is, is what it's booting to install Windows.
 

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Then you have to select UEFI: that USB stick to boot the windows installer into UEFI so it can install the UEFI version of Windows. After it is installed, then you'll boot to UEFI: Windows Boot Manager (may or may not have the UEFI bit).
 
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Where do I select UEFI? Boot devices?
 

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Last edited:
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To me their just overcomplicating things. What's the main benefit of UEFI?

I'm sure there's more benefits, but a big one is support for larger hard drives (at boot time). A traditional BIOS can, at most, access around 2TB on a single physical volume (regardless of partitioning scheme) that has either 512 byte sectors(traditional), or 4KB sectors that can emulate groups of 512 byte sectors(current "Advanced Format" drives). I believe it has to do with the maximum number of sectors that can be addressed in a 32-bit style of addressing drive sectors (4,294,967,296 addresses* x 512 bytes = 2,199,023,255,552 bytes max).
*32-bit limit.
 
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There are MANY benefits to UEFI BIOS... you guys have barely scratched the surface.

Things such as secureboot, or UEFI boot.

support for much larger drives as already mentioned...

also preboot UEFI drivers for devices....

One thing surprising is that you could not boot from USB3.0 since Z77 has native chipset ports and from my experience they could be booted from but I will test this to confirm on my MVF...
 

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3TB+ HD support for one. And I have no problems installing windows on either the usb2 or 3 ports. The drivers only work once under windows, and just support usb3 speed. I did find some oddities about the ports however, black 2.0 ports are best for compatibility.
 
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Oh, in which case GPT is better but you could use MBR.
 
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