Z77X UD3H - UEFI mode Install, Win7 x64, BSOD's & Instability

[SLICKRIC21]

Greetings fellow Gigabyte owners.

Has anyone here got any experiences, or info on Installing their OS in UEFI mode on this board.

I felt like giving it a go today and have had mixed results at best.

Using the lastest F19j Beta modded with 12.6.x.xxxx OROM and Sata Drivers, and Win7 X64 HP.
Copied the install disk to a FAT32 formatted usb.
Secure erased my x2 M4's, then set up the Raid 0 array.
Then went in Bios and set the relevant bios options to "Other os" (as using Win7 x64), "UEFI only" mode for all other settings.
Started install & chose "UEFI: USB Stick" for install, had to load Raid/Sata drivers to see Raid array, installed correctly with GPT (3 partitions at seup inc called MSR).

Windows installed correctly, and boy was it quick to boot :) (skips out the Raid Config utility and just flies through startup)

Problems started with a few mins when I came to install .net framework 4.5, the system froze then BSOD.
Had a few more BSOD's when tweaking settings and options within windows, so decided to do a clean install again.

Did the whole process above identical, only this time Windows didn't install, I got an error after the 'Expanding files' stage about windows not being able to restart properly......

So did it all again....

This time BSOD with error NTFS.sys when trying to load Raid/Sata drivers.

Did it all again....

This time installed windows fine again, but again got BSOD when installing .net Framework 4.5 and various other BSOD's.


Anyone got any clues, hints or thoughts ?

I'd like to make it work as the boot time is just brilliant in this mode.

[parsec]

Re: Z77X UD3H - UEFI mode Install, Win7 x64, BSOD's & Instability

I don't have your mother board, but have installed Windows 7 HP and Windows 8 Pro in UEFI booting mode. I didn't use the Windows 7 installation very long, but I did not have the problems you did. I'm using an ASRock Z77 Extreme 4 board.

It sounds like you are doing things correctly for a UEFI booting installation. The settings in the UEFI/BIOS to enable this are confusing, and all kinds of different terms are used for the settings. One main thing that must be done is disabling the CSM, but I have no idea what that is called in your UEFI.

A few random thoughts about your problems:

You cannot have Secure Boot enabled for UEFI booting Windows 7, that is only valid for Windows 8. UEFI booting and using Secure Boot are two different things.

I used the following guide, which includes a fix (apparently) needed for Windows 7 UEFI installations on USB flash drives. If you are not aware of this, I did it this way and it worked fine: UEFI Bootable USB Flash Drive - Create in Windows That site has many other related guides that are useful.

You mentioned a modded UEFI version, with OROM 11.6. That OROM is needed AFAIK. My ASRock board's UEFI now has two Intel RAID OROMs, straight from ASRock, not modded. OROM 11.6 is for UEFI booting and 11.2 is for BIOS booting. Do you have two OROMs now? You may be Ok with one, but maybe not. I can disable UEFI booting in my UEFI (enable CSM), and the installation will MBR/BIOS boot. I checked which OROM was active in each booting mode, BIOS booting used 11.2, UEFI booting used 11.6.

When you tried the second Windows installation, did you wipe the disk with the diskpart clean command, or something else? Anything leftover from the previous installation may cause problems.

I used IRST F6 drivers version 11.6 or greater, downloaded from Intel, as they are compatible with UEFI booting. I also installed the full IRST 11.6 or greater package in Windows. Actually, both IRST 11.7 drivers are likely better, which you can get from Intel.

I've found that immediately after the Windows installation, installing the Chipset/INF files first, followed by the Intel IME software second, prevents any strange problems from occurring.

[SLICKRIC21]

two OROMS you mention in your post ? Also I see no way of checking what OROM is being used when UEFI booting as their is no utlity like which is present with the legacy OROM (ctrl+I), but I presume its using the UEFI RAID SataDriver - v12.6.0.1867

Regarding the CSM, that option (to use or disable) only appears when I set OS type to "Windows 8" or "Windows 8 WHQL" in Bios.
As I'm using Win7 x64, I set it to "Other OS" so the CSM option is gone.
For that reason i set everything to "UEFI only" in the boot options - to get as near to I can as a pure UEFI experience.

Yes everytime I did a new install I actually switched back to legacy mode, so I could boot from my Parted magic iso (I cant boot from any DVD with this board in UEFI mode for some reason - even a WIN 8 disk prepared for in EFI mode) then secure erased the disks, then setup the RAID 0 with Intel utility (ctrl+i), then switched to UEFI booting and started the install.
I'm using the 12.6.0.1033 RST drivers both at windows F6 install, and then install the full program when in windows.

One thing I didn't install at all was the Intel ME drivers yet, as you said, so i'll give that a try today.

Im going to have another play with it today, and maybe even try Windows 8, see if its any better.... if not i'll give up and go back to legacy.

I did find a thread on Anandtech where a few people with Gigabyte boards had instabilty and BSOD when using UEFI modes, but it is nearly a year old.

[SLICKRIC21]

Re: Z77X UD3H - UEFI mode Install, Win7 x64, BSOD's & Instability

Just a quick update, had a bit more luck today with this.

On the same install that was BSOD with various errors, I installed the Intel ME drivers and then my AMD GFX drivers and the BSOD's stopped.

Strange but true ?????

Wonder why ? Oh well hope it helps someone in future.

[Vinster]

Re: Z77X UD3H - UEFI mode Install, Win7 x64, BSOD's & Instability

Windows didn't install, I got an error after the 'Expanding files' stage about windows not being able to restart properly......

I have had this on my X58A-UD5 board and it was due to the RAID array (I had 3x 40GB Intel SSD'd in RAID0) for some reason was corrupt, but you wouldn't had known it, there were no errors and the array was visible and not degraded. only way to recover was to remove the RAID configuration from each drive and rebuild and re-initialize the array and then restart the installation. I had also updated the firmware on the drives for good measure, but that didn't need to be done really.

After that I didn't have any issues with the installation.

Don't know if our issues are specifically related, but that's what happened to me for that specific issue.

happy to hear you are making progress though.

Vin

[parsec]

Re: Z77X UD3H - UEFI mode Install, Win7 x64, BSOD's & Instability

two OROMS you mention in your post ? Also I see no way of checking what OROM is being used when UEFI booting as their is no utlity like which is present with the legacy OROM (ctrl+I), but I presume its using the UEFI RAID SataDriver - v12.6.0.1867

Regarding the CSM, that option (to use or disable) only appears when I set OS type to "Windows 8" or "Windows 8 WHQL" in Bios.
As I'm using Win7 x64, I set it to "Other OS" so the CSM option is gone.
For that reason i set everything to "UEFI only" in the boot options - to get as near to I can as a pure UEFI experience.

Yes everytime I did a new install I actually switched back to legacy mode, so I could boot from my Parted magic iso (I cant boot from any DVD with this board in UEFI mode for some reason - even a WIN 8 disk prepared for in EFI mode) then secure erased the disks, then setup the RAID 0 with Intel utility (ctrl+i), then switched to UEFI booting and started the install.
I'm using the 12.6.0.1033 RST drivers both at windows F6 install, and then install the full program when in windows.

One thing I didn't install at all was the Intel ME drivers yet, as you said, so i'll give that a try today.

Im going to have another play with it today, and maybe even try Windows 8, see if its any better.... if not i'll give up and go back to legacy.

I did find a thread on Anandtech where a few people with Gigabyte boards had instabilty and BSOD when using UEFI modes, but it is nearly a year old.

Yes, there would be on legacy OROM and one UEFI OROM. If one is supposed to be for legacy and the other for UEFI, then it should be Ok, but that assumes each OROM is the appropriate one. Since they are both the same version, how can they be told apart if the version number is used for identification? My UEFI has two different versions, so it is easy to tell.

If you have the IRST Windows GUI installed, from the full IRST driver installation program, that can be used to check the OROM version. Run the IRST GUI and click on Help. A new window will open with the help documentation. One feature in that screen is System Report, which will list the OROM version.

The UEFI booting settings in your board's UEFI seem strange to me. My ASR board has one, CSM either enabled (the default) or disabled. Related to the CSM option is Secure Boot, which can only be done with Windows 8. Enabling Secure Boot sets CSM to disabled, since Secure booting is only possible when UEFI booting. How those relate to your options, I don't know.

All I do is disable CSM, install Windows 8 in UEFI mode, and that's it. I've been using it for about three months just fine on two PCs, except for the endless Adobe Flash player failures in Firefox, that at least don't cause BSODs anymore. I used the IRST 11.6 F6 driver during the OS installation, as the 12... versions did not exist at that time. Frankly, IRST 12.6 is not an official Intel release yet, 12.5 is the latest version you can find on Intel's download pages.

IME is required for all the Z77 chipset's features to be working, you'll see at least one problem in Device Manager if IME is not installed.