ASRock Z77 Extreme4 & Windows 8 - 'very fast' boot or 'secure boot' not working.

[ClutchHunter]

ASRock Z77 Extreme4 & Windows 8 - 'very fast' boot or 'secure boot' not working.

If I enable either or both of the above the system fails to boot into Windows. If I restart the computer it just boots straight to UEFI. Help anyone?

 

[txus.palacios]

Have you installed Windows 8 using UEFI?

 

[ClutchHunter]

Have you installed Windows 8 using UEFI?

How would one figure that out?

 

[ShrimpBrime]

Have you updated the bios yet?

 

[ClutchHunter]

Have you updated the bios yet?

Yeah, it's updated to the latest release version (2.80).

Everything seems to work other than the above. Well, aside from the chassis fans going to max speed when I tell them not to, but that's only when on the H/W Monitor part of the UEFI. Outside of the UEFI they behave properly.

 

[txus.palacios]

Did you choose the CDROM: whatever option or the UEFI: whatever one?

The latter lets you use Secure Boot and Fast Boot, the former does not.

 

[ClutchHunter]

Did you choose the CDROM: whatever option or the UEFI: whatever one?

The latter lets you use Secure Boot and Fast Boot, the former does not.

I don't remember, I just did whatever seemed like the least problematic at the time. How would I find out which I picked?

 

[txus.palacios]

Look for a ~200MB VFAT partition (not MSFTRES, FAT). It should be the first partition on the disk and should have the EF00 "EFI System Partition" flag. If you don't have this, you did not use the UEFI option and you should reinstall if you want to use those functions.

 

[ClutchHunter]

This is all I see:



Guess I picked the wrong option then? :/

 

[txus.palacios]

Yup.

You could fix that without reinstalling but it is a PITA, believe me. If you want Fast Boot / Secure Boot, reinstall with UEFI.

BTW, try to go the "Linux way" when partitioning. Get a small 32GBish partition for W8 and apps. Then get a huge one for Steam / games. This way, if you need to reinstall Windows for some reason it's as easy as blowing up one small partition. Also, move the crash dumps and pagefile to the Steam partition if you do this.

 

[ClutchHunter]

Yup.

You could fix that without reinstalling but it is a PITA, believe me. If you want Fast Boot / Secure Boot, reinstall with UEFI.

BTW, try to go the "Linux way" when partitioning. Get a small 32GBish partition for W8 and apps. Then get a huge one for Steam / games. This way, if you need to reinstall Windows for some reason it's as easy as blowing up one small partition. Also, move the crash dumps and pagefile to the Steam partition if you do this.

Huh, that's really smart. I hadn't thought of that at all. I'll bookmark this and refer back to it when I one day have to reinstall.

For the sake of curiosity, how would I supposedly fix it without reinstalling?

 

[txus.palacios]

I can't remember it right now, nor can I find the page where it explained the process, but it involved:

- Backing up everything. Messing with partition tables always have the risk of totally hosing your drive.
- Creating the EFI bootloader. You had to create the files that would go on the EF00 partition. You had to get the bootloader off install.wim or some %windir% folder, and then do some registry / console magic I think to let Windows know this was now a UEFI system. Can't remember what, though.
- Moving MBR to GPT. That is reasonably hard to do without data loss: It involved destroying the MSFTRES, pulling the partition sector layout of the MBR and creating a GPT table with that old layout.
- Copying the bootloader to the EFI System Partiton.
- Pray for it not to die.

And then, the extra steps I took:
- Cry when it dies.
- Reinstall everything.