Sasqui:
First off, since no one answered you, Xpress Recovery 2 is apparently a backup scheme for your boot disk. It ONLY supports storing he image ON THE BOOT DRIVE. Since I'm using a 240GB SSD to dual-boot W7 and W8.1, there ain't much spare room for such silliness. Therefore, I didn't install it. If you have a whirlydisk as a boot device, with lots of room, and you DON'T have Acronis or something similar, it seems like a viable option. I DO use Acronis to image my boot drive, usually before any change (no, I don't use "restore points" either - wastes too much of very limited room), and at least weekly. Those images get stored on an external 2TB drive.
Second, this is a new board, and my first UEFI BIOS. I don't think I like it much (the BIOS, that is - the board's a killer). My previous machine was based on a Gigabyte X58A-UD5 mobo, with an i7-920 and 24GB of DDR3-1600 RAM. I had installed two Antec Easy-SATA adapters to allow changing the boot drive, and one data drive, easily. That worked splendidly. Shut down, change disk, power up. No, I didn't enable AHCI on SATA channels 0..3 so I didn't have hot-swap capability. Was gonna play with that, but started having problems with that system, and replaced it. Problem turned out to be pilot error during initial build, which got fixed, so I now have two good systems.
In the X58 BIOS, I would assign which SATA slot was the boot drive, which DVD and which USB HD were checked in which order. That ain't possible in the Z77 BIOS. The silly thing goes out and looks at what's there AT THE MOMENT, then decides to boot from something entirely different, like one of the data disks. So, it sits there and cycles through POST like mad. The only way to stop it is to go into Setup and correct it's scattered brain. The worse thing is that it sometimes takes several restarts of Setup to recognize the disks that are there.
Anyway, this motherboard, and especially this BIOS, seems to be designed for a single, fixed, almost appliance mode, build (which kinda makes me wonder why it's giving me such fits over which drive to boot from). It's difficult to swap disks when that usually requires a trip into Setup, or punching F12 and selecting the disk from a list. What's the point? Anything other than the standard one-boot-disk-plus-data-disks setup is made difficult. Also, if you use the same make/model of disk, it will usually boot. If you change Mfr or size or even model, it usually won't. Frustrating! The X58 BIOS didn't care.....
"Got a bootable drive in that slot? Great! Let's go!"
Based on that, and a lot more, I have decided to set this machine up as a no-change, non experimental appliance, with an SSD to boot from. I'm going back to the X58 machine for playing around. It's better suited anyway. Total waste of time and money on this kluge. Sure wish someone had warned me. But then again, I'm probably one of three idiots in the world that use the computer this way.
Oh, well, if you listen to Microsoft, we'll all be computing on tablets, or watches, or brain implants in the near future, so we won't have to worry about a desktop messing up.
Life goes on.....
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