Solved Trying to Understand UEFI and how to boot from Windows DVD

I have very little experience with Windows 8 until now. I am having an issue trying to run System Refresh or System Restore from the System Recovery Environment booted from the Windows disc. When I try to run it from the disc I already System Refresh says that the drive is locked. I tried System Restore and it said no OS's were found. I went into the CMD prompt and went to c: and can see the drive just fine.

Steps tried:

• running fixboot, fixmbr, rebuildbcd commands from CMD
• running dskchk /f (which forced a dismount)

I then read something about a non UEFI bootable disk couldn't access a GPT partition, which I think is the case here. So then I tried oscdimg to make my iso UEFI bootable (twice) and the UEFI Boot Manager still only shows 'Windows Boot Manager' at the boot menu. I even tried downloading an iso that was already UEFI incase I did it wrong and it still doesn't see it.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong here??

When you go to your BIOS boot options the DVD drive should be listed twice, once with UEFI in front of it and one entry with no UEFI in the description. Selecting the entry with UEFI in the description will boot from the DVD in UEFI mode. If the PC doesn't have UEFI or UEFI is disabled you won't see UEFI mentioned in the boot menu.

The screen shot in step 4 here, http://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...are-interface-install-windows-8-a.html?filter will show what I mean.

Thanks for your help and I wish it were that easy. Here are the pictures of my boot settings in UEFI and Legacy mode...

UEFI http://oi40.tinypic.com/14m7053.jpg

Legacy http://oi42.tinypic.com/2rf635f.jpg

The order changes after changing from UEFI to Legacy so I think they are seperated unlike the menu you posted. You can see CDROM is listed first for both. With Legacy mode it boots off the Windows disk without any keys being pressed. With UEFI it tries to boot the OS.

If I press F12 to get to the boot menu when UEFI is selected I get a boot menu as shown here.
http://oi41.tinypic.com/28l9af9.jpg

I have never seen anything other than Windows Boot Manager which boots the hard drive.

Added pictures.

nfg said:

thanks for your help and i wish it were that easy. Here are the pictures of my boot settings in uefi and legacy mode...

Uefi

legacy

the order changes after changing from uefi to legacy so i think they are seperated unlike the menu you posted. You can see cdrom is listed first for both. With legacy mode it boots off the windows disk without any keys being pressed. With uefi it tries to boot the os.

If i press f12 to get to the boot menu when uefi is selected i get a boot menu as shown here.

i have never seen anything other than windows boot manager which boots the hard drive.

Click to expand...

Ok, not what I was expecting, not sure I can offer any suggestions at the moment. What I see on my UEFI laptop is basically what I posted.

Thanks for trying to help. Its a Gateway Laptop and I'm not a big fan of Gateway anyway. Even if we can't figure out how to boot to the DVD do you have any suggestions on how to unlock the drive so I can use Refresh? Or is it locked because of what I mentioned above (must boot of UEFI disk).

I'm not sure if this helps but I do my installs from USB thumb drives. Everything I read says you can't install in UEFI mode if the thumb drive is formatted in NTFS. the recommended format is fat 32. One thing you could try is making a bootable thumb drive and booting from that. http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/15458-uefi-bootable-usb-flash-drive-create-windows.html?filter

Thank you sir, alphanumeric! I was able to create and successfully boot from the USB (with UEFI) and it is refreshing as we speak! While I still am not a fan of UEFI at least now I have a work around. Thanks again!

Enabling the boot device menu

Acer said:

On most Acer systems, you can use the F12 key on boot to select the drive or network from which loading the operating system. In case the F12 option does not work, you may need to enable this function.

SOLUTION

Enabling the F12 function:

1.Power on the system. As soon as the first logo screen appears, immediately press the F2 key, or the DEL key if you have a desktop, to enter the BIOS.
2.Press the right arrow key to select Main.
3.Use the arrow keys to navigate to F12 Boot Menu, and press ENTER.
4.Select Enabled, and press ENTER.
5.Press the F10 key to save changes and restart the system.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your post, theog. The issue was not that I couldn't access the f12 boot menu, it was that under UEFI (which was needed to run Refresh as Legacy showed the drive as locked) the only option on the boot menu was Windows Boot Manager and I needed to boot from my Windows DVD. After creating the Bootable UEFI USB, as suggested above, USB HDD showed up on the boot menu and allowed me to run the Refresh.

NFG said:

Thank you sir, alphanumeric! I was able to create and successfully boot from the USB (with UEFI) and it is refreshing as we speak! While I still am not a fan of UEFI at least now I have a work around. Thanks again!

Click to expand...

I'm glad that worked for you. It might actually complete faster from the thumb drive than the optical drive. Thumb drives are easier to carry and won't scratch like DVD will. I do all my installs from thumb drives and keep the required drivers and programs for the clean install on them too. If your like me though you'll probably still try to figure out why the DVD didn't work.