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[tonyappuk]

I have just been defeated by the latest technology and I am embarrassed but I thought others here might be interested. My old PC failed and it went to the dump. The symptoms were difficulties in starting from cold with an unstable tearing picture. This would gradually improve until it eventually became quite normal.  I thought it was a thermal problem because of the way it gradually came good and I did many tests to try to find it but eventually like all such faults it stopped getting better!

I decided that since I had had it for some years it should all go and I would build myself a spanking new beast. Off to Novatech for a barebones system and I even bought a legitimate copy of Win7 Pro 64 bit! I decided I would treat myself to a little fast SSD to run windows on and then add my old drives with all my old data on and that's when the problems started.

The vast majority of modern PCs have mother boards using UEFI. This seems to be very difficult to get information on. I remember a few years ago the Linux community were very concerned believing that it was all a plot by Microsoft to make dual booting Windows and Linux impossible.  Thankfully that proved to be untrue. So I installed Win 7 on my new 60 Gb SSD without too much trouble without connecting my old drives (for safety)  I tried to add one of my old drives and that's when I discovered that the new motherboard uses a UEFI bios. Most people I talked to thought it should work just like the bios system provided you set it up initially to use UEFI and Legacy. Unfortunately no matter what I did the bios set up would never see the old drives even after wiping the SSD clean four times and reinstalling with differently configured bios/UEFI. So today I admitted defeat and took it all back to Novatech for them to fix under guarantee. There a confident young lad (spit) said they would give me a call when it was fixed. I shall be overjoyed if they find the motherboard is faulty but I'm expecting a call to say "It's all fixed. You didn't do whatever!" and I shall be really embarrassed. It seems there comes a time when old buggers shouldn't try to keep up!
Tony

[broadstairs]

Tony I have a couple of machines which use UEFI and yes Linux does play well with both of them. Most PCs have a real BIOS as well and usually in there is a switch which allows secure boot to be turned off. This may be the issue with W7 as it pre-dates UEFI.

I actually have secure boot off on my laptop because at present Linux has not come up with a method of allowing hibernate in secure more, reason is that you need to be able to verify the boot image at boot time in case someone has swapped the HDD where the swap file which holds the image is located.

Stuart

[guest]

UEFI pre-dates Windows 7 by two years.....

[licquorice]

I have to admit the only way I could get Linux and Windows to dual boot with UEFI was to change the setting in BIOS each time. Yes you can use Linux all the time no problem, yes you can use Windows all the time np problem, but I couldn't find any settings that would allow both.

[tonyappuk]

Thank you all for your comments to my vent and cry for sympathy. My problem is the inability of the "bios" to see the additional data drives when added after the initial installation, Win 7 installed fine four times! I just hope the menders find a hardware fault and I shall be vindicated!
Tony

[loonylion]

make sure 'secure boot' is disabled, and 'compatibility support module' or 'CSM' is enabled. The boot order is likely to have two sets of entries, don't use the ones prefixed with UEFI. This should make it behave as close to a traditional BIOS as possible.

UEFI can be a real **** at times. Especially when it hasn't been implemented properly.

[tonyappuk]

Reading the motherboard manual (Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P) CSM is always on when Windows type is set to Other OS - it has to be on Win 8 to be configurable. As far as secure boot is concerned that is not mentioned using that phrase at all but you can set various passwords in the bios. In my case I set none.

The manual also states it uses a licensed AMI UEFI BIOS so hope the implementation is good.
Tony

[guest]

I'd like to say I know what the issue is but I don't (Mint, Win7 & Win8.1 all live quite happily here).

If I had to take a stab I'd be looking at GUID issues on the old disks ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table ) as likely to be in the right area....

[tbailey2]

Had a similar issue a while back and solved it by putting the old discs in external USB3 enclosures and using them that way...

[parkdale]

Nearest solution I could find

http://superuser.com/questions/461979/windows-using-uefi-boot-on-gpt-disk-will-no-longer-boot-after-adding-an-mbr-ha

I abandoned UEFI booting because I found that I could not make a bootable usb stick go figure!

Robin

[Chrysalis]

yeah disable secure boot everything will work fine without it.

You should be happy with uefi tho as overall its a massive improvement from the old text based bios's.

have to say tho I have never had issues using old drives. uefi bios is backwards compatible with non uefi.

Also I made a multi boot usb stick using ezboot, has win7/8.1/win10/centos/debian/macrium recovery/parted/linux live disc/freebsd (this one had to do fancy tricks with due to bsd having issues booting off usb).

The usb stick is MVR not GPT based as it has to work in my older mchines and works fine in my uefi pc.

Normally the bios if it detects non uefi will show the device twice in the boot order, one with uefi and once without.  You just need to boot the device in legacy mode and it will work.

[tonyappuk]

Pleased to say I have been somewhat vindicated although I should have found it myself. The fault was an intermittent SATA power cable, the sort that has daisy chained connectors. I'm not sure what was happening exactly but it's all fixed now Novatech having replaced the cable free of charge. My preoccupation with UEFI blinded me to basic checks with a meter. The other failure that I thought had occurred during the transfer of drives was of a 500Gb WD drive which at one stage started to "tick" and I thought the worst had happened. However with a good power cable all is well. It is interesting that this "ticking" effect on a WD drive also happened to Blackeagle http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,13833.msg260426.html#msg260426 which was also a WD drive and that was a faulty power cable. Something to bear in mind.
Thanks for all the helpful suggestions but it's the simple things that catch us out!
Tony

[burakkucat]

. . . it's the simple things that catch us out!

Indeed, that is so often the case. I'm pleased to know that it has ended well.