Mayayana wrote:
"Neil" wrote

| So, it may be that if the notebook drive is old enough that
| SMART was relatively "new", it may not be 100% compatible with Win8.x,
| either.

A follow-up note: The disk is only 3 years old.
It's an Asus laptop that came with Win8. So I'm
assuming it was a lemon disk. But I also wonder
about frivolous disk activity. There seem to be
an increasing number of programs that will keep
accessing the disk as part of the always-on service
model. The average person has no way of knowing
that's happening.

Also, this is my first time with a UEFI BIOS and
I didn't know the details. An aspect that no one
else seems to have caught: It turns out that UEFI is
still transitional. BootIt and UBCD won't boot without
the CSM module loaded. Memtest86 will. Win8 install
DVD will boot with CSM but won't access GPT partitions
unless booted with UEFI. Then there's also the SATA
vs IDE emulation.

The different settings cause different versions
of drives -- or no drive at all -- to show up in the
BIOS boot order. And there's no helpful message
when things are incompatible. It would be nice if it
showed something like: "Disk in DVD drive is not UEFI
compatible." Instead, the drive just disappears
from the boot order or fails to respond. That's crazy
that the drive should disappear entirely from the
BIOS boot order.

It took me a long time to figure out that it all
depended on a combination of SATA/IDE and UEFI/CSM
variations, and the various disks I was trying to
use. That led me on a wild goose chase of suspecting
loose motherboard connections.

That's not how it's supposed to work.

My newest motherboard, when in UEFI+CSM mode,
offers *both* legacy and UEFI boot devices in
the list. In fact, if media is hybrid and supports
both modes of booting, there are *two* entries
in the popup boot menu, one for the CSM instance,
one for the UEFI instance. If I wanted a UEFI/GPT
install of Windows 8, then in the BIOS, I would
select the UEFI instance of the DVD drive on the
first boot.

I can boot anything I want as a result. Both
ecosystems are supported simultaneously. If I
want a UEFI only environment, I can disable
CSM and only UEFI things happen. I've only
done that the one time, for a series of experiments,
because my attempts to do the same in VirtualBox,
revealed the UEFI BIOS in VirtualBox is terrible.

My BIOS is also smart enough to search the disks
and find the first bootable one. When I have
a data drive and an OS drive connected, I don't
even need to interfere with the machine, and it
just does the right thing.

A good BIOS makes a big difference.

Paul