Vaio Z R4041M3 BIOS disables EFI BOOT!

Jesus...

I flashed by BIOS with the R4041M3 so I can install the latest NVidia drivers for Windows 7.

I wanted to enable "Advanced" options with the InsydeH20 hack (which requires EFI boot) - and I kept getting those

"Remove disc or other media" messages.

I thought something went wrong with my USB stick, tried at least 5 of them and finally also tried Windows image itself - with no luck!

Then, I switched back to old BIOS - and the EFI boot worked immediately on the first USB drive!

Shame on you Sony... I wonder if this is intentional (to prevent people hacking into the BIOS option) - or just a stupid mistake. Problem is, this limitation also prevents x64 Windows installation from booting from USB drive

 

Same goes for R4043M3

EFI boot disabled

s...

 

Boot from the InsydeH20 hack is different from booting x64 windows installation from USB drive. I had booted up and installed x64 Windows several times via a flash drive under R4041M3; when I test the new drivers. The boot in the InsydeH20 hack is making use of a special routine in the Bios. You don't need any boot sector in the USB drive and we don't need to enable boot from external device. Sony had disable this special boot in the new bios to prevent us to enable the Advance menu again.

To make your USB bootable and install Windows 7, you need to format it in NTFS format and then transfer a bootsector to the USB drive. There are a lot of articles on the web regarding this.

 

Yes, but before to install Vista / Win 7 the only thing you need to do was

a) Format USB stick with FAT32
b) Copy the files from the ISO image/DVD

^ This is so-called "EFI" boot, because BIOS will look into the EFI folder on the root of the device. It makes OS installations very easy, without need to fiddle with USB boot sectors.

I am quite sure Sony disabled UEFI boot completely - because this is how Windows Vista / 7 was booting (from /EFI directory), and now I cannot do it anymore.

If you transfer the bootsector etc... - this is the "old style" BOOT - needless to say, it is much more complicated - and for no real reason, except for Sony's paranoia.

 

Yep, the boot manager is gone now. You cannot access it anymore by pressing 'F1' or 'ESC' key during boot up.

 

This is totally ridiculous.

So, after a year and more of waiting that they finally enable VT, they did so - but just to turn another useful feature OFF?

What is with Sony these days

I guess the BIOS patcher can be made to work even without EFI boot - e.g. by putting it in normal GRUB, but I guess not too much people are willing to do that now that VT is ON.

Alternatively, someone might figure out what is preventing NVidia driver to work correctly with old BIOS-es.

 

Has anybody verified if the advanced menu is still present in the bios or are you just guessing?
(even if it can not be enabled with the old method)

TDO

 

Well it is impossible to verify, as the only way to do it is via patcher.

And, since patcher is also using EFI boot to load itself (EFI GRUB) - you can't do it with the new BIOS.

It is not so much for this patcher, but the more annoying fact is that this limitation also prevents EFI boot in general - which, as said before, is quite useful feature for very quick OS deployment.

 

I know what is boot from UEFI mode. If your purpose is to boot an UEFI application from the bios, you are correct. Sony had disabled this to prevent us from tweaking the EFI variables. If you just want to install Windwos 7 from a flash drive, UEFI boot is not the only solution.

In fact, booting from the UEFI mode and then run the Windows 7 installation is not that easy. Here is the documentation from Microsoft regarding the process:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/0/b/00bba048-35e6-4e5b-a3dc-36da83cbb0d1/UEFIGuide.docx

This is a very complicated process. Far complicated than the process I am using.

 

Weird - because for me, it just works by simple formatting and copying the files from the ISO.

BIOS then looks into /EFI folder and launches Windows 7 setup

Not anymore.

 

This is something new to me. The EFI directory of Windows 7 cd is /EFI/Microsoft/boot. So, you mean that the bios will boot from this directory /EFI/Microsoft/boot directly instead of booting from /EFI/boot/bootX64.efi ?

 

Well it always did, that's how I was installing Windows for quite a while.

IIRC, EFI spec says that the BIOS should look first in /EFI/BOOT and, if there is no BOOTX64.efi, it should look in /EFI folder and any other subfolders.

Now, if I do the same with the new BIOS, I am greeted with "Replace disk or other media" message.

Honestly I see not too much sense in all this - I mean, the main incentive for people to "hack" into Sony InsydeH20 BIOS was the absence of VT-x support. Now that this issue has been fixed, I guess the number of people willing to fiddle with the BIOS hacks is quite irrelevant.

 

I have no concern whether I can do this EFI boot from the USB flash drive as I can still install Windows from USB drive using other method. Now, my question is whether Sony had disabled the EFI boot from the hardidsk. Some bios is able to boot faster using EFI boot from SSD/harddisk; especially using Windows 7. There is a video of booting a T400 using Windows 7 and SSD in EFI boot mode for around 11 seconds. I had replaced my harddisk with an Intel X25m G2 and now my boot time in Windows 7 takes around 20 seconds. I may want to try to clean install the whole Windows 7 using the EFI boot mode later on when the new Intel SSD firmware comes out. If Sony disable this as well, we may lack of a way to improve the boot performance.

 

There is a bigger problem with new BIOS. If I change boot order moving HD first, I can no longer boot from CD/DVD (to do a restore, for instance) even if I then move optical drive item to top. I just get blinking cursor in the upper left corner for a moment and then blank screen during boot. It does spin CD at first but then just leaves it be. That means I cannot touch boot order options at all after flashing BIOS and laptop will always check optical drive during boot thus slowing down the process. Why Sony could not just leave F1/ESC during boot alone?

 

I just tested with my Z690 using R4043M3 and it seems I don't have this problem. By changing the setting to boot from HD as first, it ignores any optical disks; then by setting to boot from optical drive as first again, it can at least boot from any of the following disks:

memtest86+ 4.0
Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 RTM [MSDN]

 

By the way, just confirmed that Sony no longer boots Z in EFI mode with R4043M3. I tried to install Windows Server 2008 R2 x64, but this time it does not show up the message that "GPT is required..."

 

At least my X25-E 64G boots Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 within 22 seconds, which is already faster than most smartphones and i am satisfied

 

I have Win Server 2008 R2 x64 installed

How do I check if it is an EFI boot?

I see that I have EFI files in /Windows/Boot/Efi

@edit - OK I see I have no ntldr or anything in the root of the system partition - so, it looks like it does indeed boot from EFI in case of HDD.

@edit #2 - umm, actually no, I just looked in the hidden system partition, it still has the old "bootmgr" (ntldr style)

 

I think it is still possible to mess with the bios by using another tool called symcmos. The patcher was indeed loading from /efi. Symcmos dumps the bios data; after disassembling and changing it, we can recompile and upload it back with the same tool. This is how it used to be done on old SZ models.

 

When I was using R2168M3 I used the "F1 trick" to install my Server 08 R2 on an MBR partition. Now I can use WinHex to see in the 100MB hidden partition there is the bootmgr. What does it mean? If I have installed on a GPT partition will it do an EFI boot?

 

Unfortunately Symcmos is for Phoenix-based BIOS-es only.

InsydeH20 UEFI is a different beast, and the way it stores configuration data is quite different.

Back to the EFI boot question - I am quite sure I booted Server 2008 R2 setup by EFI means (from the USB stick) - but I am not really sure if it installed itself in a way that it boots by EFI means.

Looking at the hidden partition, it does not look like that, but I've never seen an EFI boot partition on a HDD, so I cannot tell...

Anyone with more experience in this?

 

@psyq321 What is the fastest way to see the hidden partition? Linux? If I can get my configuration (I still haven't updated the bios and I have win 7 on ssd), we might check and compare our boot tables.

 

Found the hidden partition. I have bootmgr and the /efi directory. What can I make of this?

 

Hard to say, until someone suggests a way to check if Windows was boothing through efi or not...

 

Just did an experiment of installing a EFI boot of Windows 7 on the SSD and boot from there. I confirmed that Windows 7 can still boot in EFI mode even in bios B4043M3.

However, using EFI boot of Windows 7 on Z has a lot of problems:
1) The Windows 7 is a bit unstable when I boot from EFI mode. Sometimes, Windows 7 failed to boot or even enter into Bluescreen.

2) The Sony bios flash utility cannot run in the Windows 7 booted via EFI. It will say driver failed to load.

3) The boot option in the Bios does not work once you configure the OS on hard disk boot in EFI. Those boot options are just for traditional Bios type of boot; not EFI. Even you configure it to boot from external device or CD Rom, it will still boot from the EFI configured hard disk first. Unlike other bios that support EFI boot; there is no EFI boot option in the bios to control the EFI boot. I almost need to take out the hard disk and wipe it in from other system in orderr to stop this. Fortunately, I found a way to stop the EFI boot by using the Diskpart to rename the boot EFI files in the hidden EFI boot partition.

In short, forget EFI boot in Vaio. Vaio bios has no support for this and there are many problems.

 

Aha

I guess they disabled looking for /EFI boot files in the removable devices only.

If they find EFI folder with boot files on the internal hard drive / SSD, they will still boot from it.

And, it looks like the age-old security vulnerability is still there (booting from EFI overrides everything else) but now is somewhat less relevant as there is no way you can do that with removable drive. With older BIOS versions, you could automatically boot from a removable drive even if the removable drive boot is disabled - you just needed an EFI boot file on the removable drive.

Now, one thing I do miss is very easy boot of Windows Vista / 7 / Server 2008 R2 from USB stick - you just needed to copy the files from the ISO image - this does not work anymore and I hate it.

For now, I am using old BIOS and Nautis 190.62 video driver that does not experience split-screen garbage.

If I have some time, I will try to boot InsydeH2O util from the hard-drive (EFI boot) and see if the new BIOS has advanced menu still - who knows, maybe EFI booting could be enabled still.

 

What Bios version are you using? I found that I could not boot up from the USB stick by just copying files to an USB stick at R4040M3. Yet, the mod is stilling working at R4040M3. (i.e. it will execute the BOOTX64.EFI file under the /EFI/Boot directory) I didn't try your method on bios before R4040M3. That may imply your method can only work on very old bios level; such as R2xxxx or R3xxx level. Sony had stopped the EFI boot from a mobile device starting from R4040M3. Maybe they need to do so to avoid the default EFI boot of an Vista X64 DVD rom during installation. Sony then further stop that BOOTX64.EFI call starting from R4041M3 to avoid us use the mod.

One of my original plan was to try to put the mod in the hard disk and then see if I can mod the R4041M3. However, I gave up as I had no chance to stop this EFI boot without taking out the SSD. Anyway, the additonal options in the Adv Menu has no value to me. So, I don't want to spend more time to carry this experiment.

It is pity that I cannot use the EFI boot from the harddisk due to stability issue. The EFI boot has potential to improve the boot time but Sony didn't fully implement and support it in their Bios.

 

I'm using R3052M3

You know what - I'm going to test this right now. I'll flash the BIOS with the latest one.

I'll format the SATA HDD and switch off my SSDs and replace them with it.

Let's see

 

SUCCESS (with R4043)!!

Ok, if you connect a HDD/SSD with EFI - it will not work ("Missing Operating System") - just like it won't work with EFI file on a USB stick.

HOWEVER - if you disconnect ALL internal drives and plug the USB stick with EFI boot, boot manager will appear! Offering you to boot from file - just point to BOOTX64.EFI and - voila! it works!

Also, advanced menu is still here - I just enabled it, and it's there in all glory, all advanced options from the previous versions are there still. I'll investigate if there is more.

Now, this means that boot manager is still there, it is just disabled in case any fixed disk is present. I guess it might have something to do with the EFI boot issue with Windows achau mentioned.

I will see if I could re-enable EFI boot just for being able to boot from USB sticks easily, or maybe to figure out a shortcut to boot manager.

 

Nope, there are no more advanced options compared to older BIOS-es (EFI firmwares, that is)

I guess boot manager can be enabled by poking some configuration register (just like 0x25A seems to be enabling/disabling advanced menu) but I am not really willing to play with that and end-up with turning the laptop to a brick.

I'll see if some other way can be found around this.

 

Can you provide a bios dump?

So that everybody can have the advanced menu without opening his Z.

TDO

 

Yes the bootmanager is also a register.
On the Quanta SW8 it is at offset 26 of the OEM Dataset.
But I have no clue what the offset an the Sony is.


TDO

 

There is a tool for dumping InsydeH2O firmware - it is just that this will take some time.

Also, there is an extra amount of PITA with the fact that R4043M3 requires me to open my Z and disconnect all drives in order to get the damn thing to boot from EFI file on a stick...

But yeah, once I also figure the boot manager out I will dump the rom, so everybody can have it.

 

Hi guys,

Long time reader, first time poster. I just want to confirm the "can't boot from USB issue under the last 2 new BIOSes R4041 and R4043". Thing is.... my Z31WN European version, flashed with R4043, is able to boot from my USB stick drive.

I enabled the boot from external device option in the BIOS, and it just booted off my USB stick that contains plainly copied Windows 7 files from the DVD. I can see the first screen of Windows 7 setup, but didn't go further as I'm not ready to upgrade yet (backups and stuff) and just exited.

Is this not sufficient to install Windows 7 from a USB stick? Or did I miss something in this thread...

Edit: forgot to include that I put "External Device" at the top in the boot order.

 

It is, but that's not the problem we discuss here. When they said "can't boot from USB", they refer to the EFI boot in USB (in order to modify BIOS)