Setting up uefi boot after an 'In-place' upgrade

[rfranzel]

I have an HP Pavilion dv7t-7000 CTO Quad Edition with two 750GB hard drives that was purchased with Win 7 in July.  I did an "in-place" upgrade to Windows 8 in September because I did not want to reinstall my application software.  Now (of course) I would like to modify my installation to boot UEFI.  When I change the BIOS setting to disable legacy support, I, predictably, receive a "Boot Device Not Found" error.

How can I set up the system for a UEFI boot?

It may help to share my drive partition mappings:

Disk 0:

System, 199MB NTFS

OS (C: ) 676 GB NTFS

Recovery (E: ) 21GB NTFS

HP_Tools 108 MB FAT32

Disk 1:

(No title) 100 MB Healthy (EFI System Partition)

New Volume (D: ) 698 GB NTFS

Thanks for your help.

[Cloud_Strider]

Are you able to boot by selecting the boot drive manually?

Power the notebook off.
Power it on and press F9 about once a second.
A menu should appear with bootable devices.

Let me know if that appears.

Is this the Windows 8 RC? Windows 8 didn't officially launch until October 26, 2012. If it is the RC, some features may not work properly including secure boot as the BIOS was made for the release candidate so the signature for Windows 8 that BIOS has may not match as a result.

Does it boot backup properly when legacy is enabled?

[rfranzel]

Hi.  Thanks for your reply.

During the summer HP was offering systems with Windows 7 installed, and Microsoft offered a $14.99 upgrade to Windows 8 Professional.  That was available on October 26th.  I guess it was shortly before the general release, but it was not an RC.

I do get the boot menu options:

     Boot from EFI file

     Notebook Hard Drive

     Internal CD/DVD Rom Drive

I selected "Boot from EFI File and got two choices:

     HP_TOOLS,

     [Acpi(PNP......

     NO VOLUME LABEL,

     [Acpi(PNP.....

Each of them results with a window titled "File Explorer".  The HP_TOOLs partition offers optoins of <$Recycle.Bin> and <Hewlett-Packard>.  The NO VOLUME LABEL parition resulted in no choices.

Would the EFI System Partition on Disk 1 have been created with my Windows 8 installation or delivered with Windows 7?  Is there a way to copy that partition from Disk 1 to Disk 0 (maybe to replace the NO VOLUME LABEL partiion)?

It does boot when legacy is enabled.  It does not boot when legacy is disabled.  I'm not sure about your last question.  If you meant did it boot properly, then yes.  Otherwise, I'm not sure what you mean by "boot backup." 

Thanks again for your help.

[Cloud_Strider]

It is possible that the boot partition is not a true UEFI partition with an in-place upgrade.

I do not have access to that information and my Google search was unsuccessful in turning up a solid confirmation of one way or the other.

At this point, a trial by fire with a clean install would confirm if it was a result of it being an in-place upgrade. However, that can be a bit more than what you want as it would erase your files and would require a backup of important files before continuing.

However, the option you had selected doesn't really have anything with booting Windows 8 itself.

I am more curious as to what happens with Legacy disabled and manually selecting the notebook hard drive to boot from in the F9 menu.

[rfranzel]

When I disable legacy boot in the bios, and then press F9, I get a Boot Options screen, as we would hope, but there are no options llsted.  I guess that's consistent with the "Boot Device Not Found" error when I just let it try to continue.

You are right that I really would prefer not to have to reinstall all my apps (and data) after a clean installation.  Several will require contacting vendors to reenable licenses, and because of that, I'd have days of downtime.  I wonder... If I clone my disk 0 to disk 1.  Then do a clean install of Windows 8.  And then copy the cloned C: drive partition back from disk 1 to disk 0 if that would result in my apps installed, but with a clean Windows 8 installation.

What do you think?

[Cloud_Strider]

Cloning the partitions won't result in a clean installation. It would actually undo the clean installation and put the exact same setup back in place. It would be a lot of work to get back to where you started really.

I seem to be a bit confused, so I would like to get some clarification. It is also possible that this notebook's BIOS does not behave the way most BIOS behaves.

An earlier post indicated that you had a Notebook Hard Drive listed as an option when pressing F9 (just below Boot from EFI file). Is this option not listed or does nothing happen when you select that option?

When Secure Boot is enabled or Legacy is disabled, only UEFI boot devices should be listed as Legacy is no longer option at that point. So, all items listed should actually be UEFI when Legacy is disabled. At least, this is how Windows 8 UEFI BIOS has worked on all of the test units I have looked at. That's not to say I have access to a physical system with your exact BIOS.

The only option I can think of at this point is to perform a clean install, but I cannot guarantee this will work.

You could check for a new version of BIOS, but I doubt there is a newer version available already.