Is HP's UEFI/BIOS implimentation making it hard to use 3rd party drives?

I'm seeing some weirdness with a new HP Pavilion. My Alienware M17x-R4 uses UEFI, but throwing it in to BIOS mode was painless, and everything just worked.

This HP, I originally tried installing on a new drive without adjusting the BIOS, and at a certain point Windows hit an infinite reboot loop.

I ended up having to reinstall with the settings set to "legacy" mode (meaning BIOS...I guess) and it did install, but now it never seems to find the OS on the first boot attempt. Rebooting seems to start windows right away.

Weirdly it says that even in "legacy" mode it follows the UEFI boot order first, then the BIOS boot order, so I'm wondering if that's somehow the issue.

This is semi-separate, but I'm not sure if there's a way to set up secure boot except with the original OEM setup. It had me enter a code printed on the screen each time I switched that or UEFI with that on or off. Don't know if that's messing something up...

 

Did you turn off the UEFI from the BIOS setting to see if that wasn't causing the HDD problem? If you wanted to format a HDD for Windows 7 I do know they mention you have to turn off UEFI so that you could reformat the laptop to Windows 7.

 

Thanks, yeah I had it set to "legacy" which appears to be the BIOS emulation mode. Tried a bunch of different combinations but I couldn't get it working better than intermittently seeing the hard drive (well, possibly it was always that the first boot, seems like the first boot never worked, second boot always did).