EFI Implementation, BIOS, and HP Trouble-Shooting

This topic may have already been discussed here, but I did a NBR search and found only brief product review mentions of EFI ( Extensible Firmware Interface) as the future BIOS replacement and that limited implementations had been incorporated in new Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Apple notebooks. I looked a little closer at HP and found a troubleshooting reference to notebooks made after “ late 2008” that may include EFI. It then occurred to me that the reference might include DV2 – DV7 models. The HP reference said to press “ESC” during system start to enter EFI mode instead of the usual F10 to enter the BIOS.

Well....ESC worked on our DV4t while F10 still works as well. It was delivered in December of last year but the DV2700tv we have that was delivered in June doesn’t offer EFI. So there you have it, we have a new tool (I think) to use for troubleshooting. I tinkered a bit with the EFI on the DV4t and frankly it looks like a DOS version of the BIOS. That said, if EFI will run the "start-up test" when you couldn’t normally get into the BIOS, then great because it has a log file.

At-any-rate, I read a lot of trouble-shooting suggestions and have yet to see anyone mention pressing ESC on a HP notebook to get to the EFI. Could be useful ?? If you folks knew this already, then I’m just a bit behind the power curve I guess. If you didn’t, then it’s good FYI….

Additional Info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface

EFI experience comments solicited.

 

Umm, afaik my DV5 has it but it's not really of much use. It allows running the two useless tests that are in the BIOS, plus recovery from the partition that i deleted anyway. Nothing new here.

It's simply another useless menu.

 

So…. I did some more tinkering with the EFI function on the DV4t. I removed the RAM (simulating bad RAM) to see if EFI would still open and allow access to the EFI diagnostics. The answer…… Nope…. not yet. The reason I say “yet” is because as it turns out this is the first iteration and includes provisions for both EFI and BIOS. Eventually in the final EFI transition step, BIOS will be eliminated. Listen to this video interview of the MS EFI programmers and you get the idea there’s much more to come. How much more will be totally dependent on the manufacturers.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Goin...Environment-What-happens-before-the-OS-loads/

For the present though….I think you're right Unique…..EFI doesn’t appear to be anything more than a DOS menu appearing representation of the features already available in the BIOS.

 

It's not DOS, it's simply text mode. It would actually be cool if it had DOS embedded...

AFAIK, no new computers come with "conventional memory", that died along with the original 8088. So unless you got one of those funky designs with onboard RAM (seen a few IBM lappies with that), it's damn obvious that it's not gonna boot without RAM installed. When memory goes bad, not all of it goes anyway... That's why it causes so much frustration when it does, because stuff keeps crashing and it takes a while for you to realize why.

 

I understand that the EFI user interface isn’t DOS. I guess I should’ve described it as Text Mode Interface or Command-line or something better than “DOS menu appearing representation.” At-any-rate, EFI still has me a bit stumped as to exactly how it will be implemented in software and hardware, and what it will do for programmers and end users. No doubt the system BIOS won’t work without system memory in current BIOS driven implementations but I’ve seen Intel diagrams of UEFI that include segregated blocks for System RAM, Shared RAM, and “EFI memory” and that was the point of testing.

Perhaps the UEFI implementations I was reading about were Itanium server specific or something, but I got the impression that in some iteration of UEFI it will contain enough of it’s own memory (self-contained, SoC, USB, whatever….) to be capable of living and performing basic system hardware tests in a Shell environment outside of the OS and instead of flash or beep codes and a blank screen on error, you actually get displayed systems hardware/firmware test results, test options, and an error log file. (with the obvious exception I guess of a display problem)

It’s a learning experience, so for now my answer is still…. Not Yet.
…and just perhaps it’s not so “damn obvious” .

 

Perhaps it won't be so "damn obvious" in 10 years. Like all new technologies it costs quite some $$$ to develop, especially since it's meant to become a new standard. And that means R&D that i doubt notebook manufacturers are too eager to implement.