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Shootist
Premium Member
join:2003-02-10
Decatur, GA

Shootist to BlitzenZeus

Premium Member

to BlitzenZeus

Re: Package systems, crapware, and issues

As I have only worked with Mac's EFI system, which is very locked down (Apple), and never on a Windows system, much more open, I'm not sure. If the EFI is set to boot from the original drive adding that second drive, even if it is a MBR drive, should have no affect.

I suspect there is a setting in the EFI interface that need to be changed/set pointing to that original drive as the boot drive.

Then again if that older drive has an OS on it you may need to wipe that. If the EFI is looking to that older drive as the boot drive and there is no EFI partition the system will not boot.
BlitzenZeus
Burnt Out Cynic
Premium Member
join:2000-01-13

BlitzenZeus

Premium Member

The uefi is devoid of logical settings in this bios. I even had to make sure the new hdd was the first hdd on the sata chain so it would be the boot drive as you can't select the booting hdd in this bios under uefi, only under legacy. Not that it needs to be said, but the new hdd won't boot under legacy anyway. The only entry for hdd is UEFI: Windows Boot Manager so it could be reading the boot loader on the old hdd, however it's still triggering the boot loader on the new hdd. If this is the case booting multiple operating systems, at least on this motherboard will be a pain under uefi. I haven't had much chance to play with them much myself either.

This last time I came over I just wanted to do that little bit of research on the partitions as this is a curious issue, and if I encounter it again I want to figure out what to do if possible. There is data they want recovered off the old os partition first, and I've had interesting results with copying files in ntfs volumes in nix with inherited permissions otherwise I could just copy their old hdd to a folder on the new hdd. I don't own a sata enclosure yet as I haven't needed one, but looks like I might buy one anyway just to copy the data to get this over with, then try seeing if Win 8 will boot properly with a unpartitioned/newly partitioned drive after I get their files off.
Shootist
Premium Member
join:2003-02-10
Decatur, GA

Shootist

Premium Member

I suggest you get a SATA to USB Adapter and Not an Enclosure. The Adapters can be used with most all kinds of drives, 2.5 Notebook size, 3.5 desktop size, PATA and SATA along with optical drives. Where as an enclosure usually only works with whatever size drive it is made for.

Yes if you connect it to the new system by USB and copy the data off then Re-Partition it, using that new computer, it should set it up properly to work on that EFI system.

Although you may have to Re-Partition again once you install it inside the system. IIRC all physical disks end up with a EFI partition as that is where the partition table is stored. But I could be wrong.

What Brand it this PC. I want to make sure I never buy one and have a Heads Up if I ever need to work on one.
BlitzenZeus
Burnt Out Cynic
Premium Member
join:2000-01-13

BlitzenZeus

Premium Member

Dell, rhymes with Hell. I'm not sure this is all Dell's fault, but it is also a proprietary Dell motherboard/uefi bios.
Shootist
Premium Member
join:2003-02-10
Decatur, GA

Shootist

Premium Member

Well a friend bought a Dell XPS 8500 about a month ago and I set it up for him with a SSD and used the original drive as a storage drive. Had no problem. But it did come with Win 7 and not Win 8.

Personally I haven't had any problems with Dell computers for the last 20 years. Both at home with notebooks and at work with many Dell systems over the years. In fact I can't remember any of them failing.

We are in a New Era with EFI and Secure Boot. You know that may be it. Does the EFI have a setting for Secure Boot? If it does turn that off and see if you can then install that old drive and boot the PC.
BlitzenZeus
Burnt Out Cynic
Premium Member
join:2000-01-13

BlitzenZeus

Premium Member

I couldn't have booted the live nix cd with secure boot enabled, and yes secure boot was enabled by default.

During the initial troubleshooting I turned off secure boot to see if it was a factor, and it wasn't.

At any rate I'll be able to confirm if the system boots with the old drive in a day, or two. I'll pull the info off the os partition, and do a simple test of killing the os partition. It would seem that even if the drive is legacy/mbr it shouldn't matter, but for some reason because there is more than one windows boot loader seems to be the entire problem, even if the bios shouldn't be reading the bootloader from anything other than the first hdd in the sequence.
BlitzenZeus

1 edit

BlitzenZeus to Shootist

Premium Member

to Shootist
Made a quick trip out tonight as I already had to go out, and tested a theory I had. Moved the data over, and made the disk one big non-bootable ntfs partiton, and Win 8 booted up fine with it as a storage drive.

Since it would only take a few minutes I booted into the live nix cd with the win 8 drive disconnected, and let it install to their old drive. On reboot nix worked fine, and then I proceeded to shutdown to reconnect the win 8 drive. Win 8 again showed that it wanted to repair the install possibly due to there was an operating system on another drive, or the partition types. Nix had made two partitions, one big bootable partition for the os, and a swap partition. So I deleted the partitions on the old drive, made it one big ntfs legacy/mbr partition again, recopied their non-os files back to the old drive for redundancy, and called it a day. I'm done on this issue for the day, this seems like a very silly issue.

I'd like to see how a clean install of a win 8 goes with uefi, and if it has the same problems without all those oem/restore partitions, however I can't do that at the moment.