/* BeejBlog */

Installing Windows in UEFI Mode

For motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X99-UD4

Booting Windows in UEFI mode offers a couple mild advantages:
  1. it's more compatible with Clover if you're booting OSX this way already
  2. it's supposed to be the fastest way to boot
Notes / Lessons Learned:
  • Rufus flash usb boot tool - wound up going with mbr and uefi-csm - not the normal recommendation
  • bios settings
    • fast boot didn’t seem to matter
    • legacy usb worked in disabled mode
    • worked with “other OS” selected
    • machine would not display bios after reboot whenever i disabled CSM (even though that's what most UEFI guides recommendation)
  • what really seemed to matter was putting the usb stick in a certain USB port! i used the chassis USB header with 2 USB3 and 2 USB2… going from left to right it was the second USB3 port that worked and the left most one never would
  • Lesson Learned - Disconnect all other drives than the one installing to
    1. existing windows drives get targeted for reusing their boot partition to install the bootloader files and wouldn’t create all 4 "ideal" GPT UEFI partitions on my clean drive (Recovery, System, MSR, Primary)
    2. having my mac clover drive connected during these attempts allowed the setup utility to put the windows bootloader on that drive and ruin that clover boot…
      • reinstalling clover via vmware osx guest DID NOT put the UEFI clover bootloader back in charge!
      • had to delete/rename \efi\windows folder and then the old EFI option started showing back up on the “BBS” “F12” boot choice menu
  • to confirm you’re really booted into UEFI mode:
    • from “WinPE” environment:
      • shift F10 to open command window
      • wpeutil UpdateBootInfo
      • reg query HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control /v PEFirmwareType
      • 0x1 = legacy, 0x2 = uefi
    • from real windows:
      • msinfo32
      • look for “BIOS Mode” under System Summary