"Paul" wrote in message
news
SC Tom wrote:
"SC Tom" wrote in message news
This is kind of a follow-up to "Spontaneous Shutdown/Reboot", but a
different subject; hence the new subject line.
After still having the reboots about every week to 10 days, and swapping
out everything except the MB and APU, I decided to try a new MB.
I bought a BioStar A68MD Pro
http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=830#download,
and separately an AMD Athlon(tm) X4 845 Quad Core Processor, 3500 Mhz
CPU. I know it's kind of out-dated AFA computers go, but it was within
my budget, and had all the necessities for me.
It runs very well, considerably faster than the old Lenovo board, and
has had no shutdowns or reboots on its own. The only real complaint is
that I can't get it to boot from the CD drive if I put a bootable CD in.
It just skips over it and boots right into Windows, albeit a tad slower
than if there was nothing in the drive. About the only time I need this
is when I do my disk images- I boot from my ATI cd and image my drives
from there instead of installing ATI. Just seems a bit quicker that way
(for me anyhow).
In BIOS (latest available version), I have the Boot Options menu
http://tinypic.com/m/jtuj5w/3. Under Boot Option Priorities, I have it
set this way http://tinypic.com/m/jtuj5x/3 with "Windows Boot Manager
(SATA1)" first, then the CD drive, and then the HDD where the boot
manager resides.
Under the CD drive priorities http://tinypic.com/m/jtuj5z/3 I have my
drives set up the way I use them (although changing this order makes no
difference to my problem).
Under the HDD priorities http://tinypic.com/m/jtuj60/3, I have my boot
drive first and the other drive second (although there's no OS on it, it
still shows in the list, of course).
What I have tried is
A) 1. CD Drive
2. WBM
3. HDD0
B) 1. CD Drive
2. HDD0
3. WBM
C) 1. HDD0
2. CD Drive
3. WBM
"A" skips the CD and boots into Windows; "B" will boot from a CD, but
not if one is not present; and "C" gives a "No bootable device found.
Insert bootable media . . ." error message, with or without a CD in the
drive.
If anyone has run into this and has a solution for me, I would certainly
appreciate some help :-)
TIA!
Let me clarify that "B" will boot from a CD, if one is not present, then
it throws the same error as "C".
I did find out that by tapping F9 after turning the PC on a Boot Menu
will appear, allowing me to pick pretty much any drive I want, even ones
that aren't bootable. If I can't get it to do so automatically, at least
I'll have that to fall back on.
Thanks!
Since your popup boot menu is working, then it's
probably not a Win10 Fast Start issue.
Personally, I would be perfectly happy to drive a UEFI
computer from Popup Boot - at least, as long as the labels
used in the menu make sense!
Windows Fast Start uses the Hibernate bit, which prevents the machine
from multibooting. If you shut down Win10 with Fast Start
enabled, then the machine tries to boot from the "hibernate drive"
on the next boot. Pressing the popup boot key then doesn't work,
because the machine is hell-bent on restoring something which
is hibernated. You can interact with this, by turning off
all power, and then the popup boot key might work. If you're
multibooting, really the Fast Start on each Windows should
be disabled, to prevent various sorts of "accidents". Linux
won't mount a Windows C: which is using Fast Start and is
hibernated.
With Fast Start in Windows disabled, then no Hibernate state
is being used, and the boot controls should start to work in
the BIOS (regular priorities and so on).
*******
Partially, the way the BIOS industry works, is we have major
BIOS companies to thank, for preventing total anarchy. Award,
AMI, Phoenix, Insyde, these companies design BIOS platforms,
and prevent rank amateurs at motherboard companies, from
making gross unusable BIOS.
The BIOS companies do the hard work. They write "bring-up code"
for your chipset. They developer a framework for the setup screens.
The motherboard company doesn't have source for all of it,
and part of the package is binary blobs.
In the legacy BIOS era, this was relatively easy, because the
legacy BIOS didn't have any GUI to customize. As a motherboard
maker, you basically enabled or disabled the appearance of
certain settings, and that was a limitation on your ability
to "ruin" the BIOS.
It was still possible back then, for companies to include
cruft-ware at BIOS level. The BIOS flasher (and its many
variants), gave you an opportunity to see just how
hair-brained the staff at the factory were. So that
code didn't come from AMI, and may have been a regular
flasher with a wrapper the factory staff wrote.
In the UEFI era, the introduction of mouse driven graphics,
leaves a lot more room for mischief. And unfortunately,
it looks like your boot menu is the victim.
*******
A modern (at the moment) UEFI BIOS, contains both UEFI
and CSM support. CSM is the legacy BIOS, the old way of
doing things, and booting systems. An OS you installed
on an older BIOS-equipped motherboard, you'd need CSM
support to make it come up on your system.
Your OS DVD disc supports both legacy motherboards
(when the motherboard has CSM enabled and a CSM boot option
was used), as well as Microsoft having pure UEFI support
if you want it. I generally, even today, even in Win10,
select CSM-modes for this stuff.
The popup boot menu, can even contain entries such as
Disk1 in CSM mode
Disk1 in UEFI mode
CD/DVD drive3 in CSM mode
CD/DVD drive3 in UEFI mode
and if I wanted to do a UEFI OS installation, I might
select the bottom one, and have the booting DVD think
it was on a UEFI system. It would install on Disk1,
and use GPT/UEFI for setup. Then later, when booting
from the disk1, I would be selecting the second entry.
As the first entry wouldn't work.
Now, in the BIOS of your BioStar product, they've introduced
their own term. But, what does it mean ? The motherboard
manuals (and this is a *tradition*), neatly skip over
any discussion of the boot menu items and what they mean.
We can guess that Windows Boot Manager means the UEFI BIOS
has scanned the set of hard drives, hopes to find just
one disk with an Active flag and a BCD or boot.ini,
and it's going to boot from it. That is *insufficient*
labeling for a machine with multiple OSes on separate
hard drives.
As a result, I don't understand what they're getting at.
And I don't know if they, as a company, got an opportunity
to *change* the naming convention in there. Or, this is
actually an AMI "feature" that these people have turned
on.
Normally, the modern mixed UEFI, with its CSM option,
nicely labels what it's trying to do. That WBM is a
puzzler.
I've noticed my BIOS (which is probably AMI too), is
very clever. It can and will autoscan disks and make
choices on its own. Occasionally, the wrong drive
boots (if I forget to take control with Popup Boot),
and then I have to shut down and try booting again.
But the labeling in your screen, looks like "pure BioStar" :-/
This is the stuff you hate, where they use their own
halting English, to replace what was likely to have
been perfectly polished AMI info.
Now, each company, gets to add their own graphic
flair to these screens. And again, you can see
the "pure BioStar" shining through. My Asus UEFI screen
is at least usable, even though a couple of screens
require excessive scrolling to find stuff (the
damn screen is like a roll of toilet paper). The screen
where I load my "hardware profile" is a puzzler on mine,
and it usually takes me several tries to remember how
to use that thing (the machine forgets the hardware
settings if you do a dirty shutdown, and the settings
then need to be restored from a profile at BIOS level).
Anyway, sorry I can't shed any light on the WBM thing.
We know Windows has a Boot Manager, as that's the thing
with the multiple OSes listed in it. That's "BCD and
friends", and is normally the partition with the Active
flag. But a machine with multiple OS disks, what does
that mean exactly ? A spin of a roulette wheel ?
This is the boot menu I get when pressing F9 on boot up:
http://tinypic.com/m/jtuomw/3
It's like a stripped down BIOS screen, but it works whether I cold boot or
reboot, so I'm thankful for that :-)
Thanks for your usual, very educational dissertation. BIOS has always been
one of those "Yeah, it's there, but you better not mess with it" things, up
until recent years. I've never had a problem flashing one (knock on wood),
but I don't usually tempt fate unless there's something in the new release
that addresses a problem I may experiencing, or if I need a newer version so
I can upgrade to a better CPU :-)
Thanks again!!
--
SC Tom