Got a brand spanking new Intel Xeon X34xx (Nehalem based!) server recently (like within the last month). It’s a barebones Intel Server System SR1630HGP, with an Intel S3420GP motherboard. Which means...it supports EFI! So I'd finally be able to see what all the hype & excitement about the cool new BIOS replacement was! And I'd be able to boot off a storage array > 2TB in size! Or so I thought (insert thunderclaps, lightning, and other ominous (or just drama enhancing) signs here).
It turns out there's a bit more to getting EFI to work with Windows than just popping the DVD in the drive and powering up the computer. A brief caveat here at the beginning: these comments apply to the following firmware, so the settings may change as new releases are made:
So, first of all, the RAID functions of the chipset don't work with EFI. Period. Neither the Intel Matrix RAID option ROM, nor the LSI/ESRT2 option ROM, appear to support EFI. Sure, they're useable with the CSM enabled, and the system setup may make it seem like they can be enabled, but as soon as EFI is used, things just stop working and any arrays either wont be bootable or wont even be found.
Actually, even with a standalone LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i, things aren't that easy to get working. The CSM has to be enabled in order to get into the controllers firmware ("WebBIOS" or something now). And there's only like half a second to press the right keys to get into it the first time... But once the arrays and any settings are configured, EFI does work with the controller and CSM can be disabled.
Oh, and if using an internal SATA DVD drive, apparently it has to be plugged into port 5, otherwise it doesn't always show up as a bootable device. This might just be a legacy of leaving the Matrix RAID enabled when it shouldn't have been, but with the drive on port 5 it always worked.
Once the storage stuff is taken care of, the big tricky bit is that Windows apparently requires a VGA BIOS to be present in order to work properly. This little nugget of crucial information can be found by digging around the Windows Hardware Design site and reading up on firmware & UEFI/EFI. In the system setup, there's a setting for "Enable Use Legacy Video for EFI OS" that becomes available when "Enable EFI Optimized Boot" is enabled. BOTH settings need to be enabled for Windows to successfully run. I think I may have been able to get WinPE to start off the DVD without the video setting enabled, but it certainly wasn't stable & reliable. May just have been that the setting didn't actually get cleared, got temporarily turned back on again, or I'm just confused by having tried too many different things.
A final bit of trouble I ran into was getting Windows Setup to not encounter errors. For some reason it kept saying that Windows couldn't be installed to the drive because the system couldn't boot from the selected drive (although Setup would let you continue with the installation, true to its word, Windows wouldn't boot after setup). To fix this issue, I had to boot into WinPE (with CSM enabled/EFI boot disabled again! otherwise you can't get a command prompt from the setup disks!), fire up diskpart, convert the disk to GPT, then manually create the EFI System Partition (ESP) and Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR). The next time setup started from an EFI boot, the error was gone and setup worked correctly.
So, a summary of what needs to be done:
Now playing: Emm Gryner – Public – 05 Phonecall 45
Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.