Boot from CD and Win8.1

"GlowingBlueMist" wrote:
On 1/23/2015 2:47 AM, Tim w wrote:

Does windows 8.1 do something I thought was impossible and somehow
prevent booting from a CD. I spent ages trying to boot fro a disk and I
can't think what else has happened. The only CD I can boot from is the
8.1 install disk. Any others don't work, although they work perfectly
well on another (W7) system.

I have 8.1 on a netbook with an external usb CD drive. There is a disk
error which chkdsk is unable to fix (gets to 12% and just stays there
all night). The disk error I think is causing the Hard disk usage undr
Windows to rise to 100% and stay there making the system so sluggish it
is unusable.

Yes the motherboard developers and Microsoft joined together to come up
with UEFI as a replacement for the older traditional BIOS starting with
Windows 8.0 if my memory is working correctly.

Not quite; UEFI has been around for longer than Windows 8, and (for now)
it's optional as far as Windows is concerned.

I'm not going to go into the why they wanted to replace BIOS as that can
get quite political in a hurry.

Abbreviated summary: a significant driver for its introduction is that
unlike the traditional BIOS[*] boot protocol it allows for the boot-time
components of the operating system to be authenticated, thus reducing the
attack surface that's available to malware that in a legacy boot environment
would be able to install a rootkit. It also provides a way for the firmware
itself to be protected.
[*] Unfortunately, the legacy boot protocol has come to be commonly referred
to as "BIOS" mode, even though "firmware" and "BIOS" are generally used as
synonyms, and UEFI mode is still implemented in firmware/BIOS.

I'm *not* an expert in the area of firmware protection but I work with some
of the people whose job is the be experts, and they have found some
"interesting" incidnets. Just don't ask where those incidents were found; if
I told you I would have to redacted.

What it does boil down to is if you are trying to use older Linux as a
emergency recovery method you are pretty much blocked.

Assuming that the computer worked with an earlier Windows installation and
you haven't diddled with the machines BIOS setup options, it's unlikely that
the machine has shifted from legacy to UEFI boot protocol. I think you'll
find that most current-production Wintel computers are capable of both
legacy and UEFI boot, and a few of them (the Microsoft Surface, for example)
supports *only* UEFI.

Windows 8 can be installed on machines that are configured for either legacy
or UEFI. Additionally, with suitable magic incantations it's possible to
build an image that is capable of booting in either legacy or UEFI mode,
depending on how the computer's BIOS has been configured. The Windows 8
installation disk is an example of this dual-boot capability; it can be used
to boot a machine in either legacy or UEFI mode without requiring any action
by the user. (Clue: look in the root of the boot device for the presence of
folders named "BOOT" and "EFI".)

When I prepared Windows 8.1 for distribution within my POE we used legacy
boot on most of the computers on which we planned to support Windows 8, but
for two mmodels we had to use UEFI. (One was the Surface 3; the other had
some compatibility problems with a security package that forced us to use
UEFI.)

Incidentally, I built both the legacy and UEFI images under VMware
Workstation; version 10 could be configured to use UEFI but it wasn't
officially supported; version 11 now fully supports it.

The Linux people have not taken this change lying down however. You can
now get UEFI approved Linux distributions.

Unless something's changed recently, that's done with a hack that Linus
Torvalds reportedly dislikes. No, I've not chased this down to get the
current status; I've got enough to do keeping about 12,000 Windows machines
in working order.

Yes there may be ways of turning off the UEFI on your motherboard if you
can gain access to the firmware but I'm no expert on the subject and
suspect it would take a fresh install of Windows to make it workable again
after making the switch. Hopefully others will chime in here an give you
some better advise.

If your computer supports both legacy and UEFI boot protocols then there
should be a more-or-less obvious option to make the selection in the BIOS
setup dialogs. The Surface is the only product I've encountered that
supports only UEFI but there are probably others.

Joe

Tim w wrote:
Does windows 8.1 do something I thought was impossible and somehow
prevent booting from a CD. I spent ages trying to boot fro a disk and I
can't think what else has happened. The only CD I can boot from is the
8.1 install disk. Any others don't work, although they work perfectly
well on another (W7) system.

Is there a fix for this because I need to boot from a CD to fix the system?

Tim W

I have 8.1 on a netbook with an external usb CD drive. There is a disk
error which chkdsk is unable to fix (gets to 12% and just stays there
all night). The disk error I think is causing the Hard disk usage undr
Windows to rise to 100% and stay there making the system so sluggish it
is unusable.

Disable Fast Startup

http://www.howtogeek.com/174705/how-...indows-7-or-8/

If your systems bios/uefi uses Secure Boot it may be necessary to
disable it in the bios/uefi setup and also enable Legacy Support.





--
...winston
msft mvp consumer apps

This could be the end of this little episode. I don't know how but it
looks like W8 has made my netbook useless. There wasn't any data on it
to lose, and it was only a thing I used about the house but I liked it
and I had amused myself by testing out some different OSs. Win8 is the
first one to actually break it.

I was able to reinstall Win8 from a usb stick but found that the
keyboard didn't work. Although I had used it during the install to key
in the Product Key once Windows was installed the keyboard was never
again recognised by the BIOS or the OS. Windows told me it was working
properly and I couldn't fix it by changing the driver. I thought I would
start again and was able to run dban to wipe the HD (with a usb
keyboard) but the BIOs still won't recognise a usb CD drive or the
laptop keyboard. It always did before.

The loss is nothing really, it wasn't worth anything and wisdom and
knowledge learned from experience are beyond value. Still don't see how
or why Win 8 could iretrievably mess up the BIOS though.

Tim w

On 24/01/2015 22:06, Tim w wrote:
This could be the end of this little episode.
[...]

Actually not the end, I fixed it. Something called 'Resetting the
Embedded Controller', ffs.

Tim w

On Sun, 25 Jan 2015 00:25:55 +0000, Tim w wrote:

On 24/01/2015 22:06, Tim w wrote:
This could be the end of this little episode.
[...]

Actually not the end, I fixed it. Something called 'Resetting the
Embedded Controller', ffs.

Tim w

ISTR recent comments in one of the Windows groups about drive or drive
controller hardware getting into a locked or otherwise dysfunctional
state requiring resetting by (e.g.) actually removing power from the
electronics.

That may be what you were experiencing.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

On 25/01/2015 22:22, Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On Sun, 25 Jan 2015 00:25:55 +0000, Tim w wrote:

On 24/01/2015 22:06, Tim w wrote:
This could be the end of this little episode.
[...]

Actually not the end, I fixed it. Something called 'Resetting the
Embedded Controller', ffs.

Tim w

ISTR recent comments in one of the Windows groups about drive or drive
controller hardware getting into a locked or otherwise dysfunctional
state requiring resetting by (e.g.) actually removing power from the
electronics.

That may be what you were experiencing.

Yes, inability to boot from a usb CD drive is still unexplained. The
webpages I looked at suggested that loss of keyboard was a result of a
messed up Embedded Controller (itself a result of an unsuccessful and
unecessary attempt to update the BIOS in the hope of getting access to
the usbCD). It was fixed by a simple battery pull procedure. I had never
heard of an EC.

Tim w

On Mon, 26 Jan 2015 14:48:08 +0000, Tim w wrote:

On 25/01/2015 22:22, Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On Sun, 25 Jan 2015 00:25:55 +0000, Tim w wrote:

On 24/01/2015 22:06, Tim w wrote:
This could be the end of this little episode.
[...]

Actually not the end, I fixed it. Something called 'Resetting the
Embedded Controller', ffs.

Tim w

ISTR recent comments in one of the Windows groups about drive or drive
controller hardware getting into a locked or otherwise dysfunctional
state requiring resetting by (e.g.) actually removing power from the
electronics.

That may be what you were experiencing.

Yes, inability to boot from a usb CD drive is still unexplained. The
webpages I looked at suggested that loss of keyboard was a result of a
messed up Embedded Controller (itself a result of an unsuccessful and
unecessary attempt to update the BIOS in the hope of getting access to
the usbCD). It was fixed by a simple battery pull procedure. I had never
heard of an EC.

Tim w

Embedded Controller just means built into the mother board or CPU,
rather than being on a plugged in card, so you probably knew of the
concept but not the word :-)

You made me think of a question, though. If you have an all-in-one such
as one of my old computers which seems to be glued together, how do you
pull the battery? That's just a matter of curiosity - the computer in
question is retired, maybe even lost (I forgot where I put it).

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

Gene E. Bloch wrote:


You made me think of a question, though. If you have an all-in-one such
as one of my old computers which seems to be glued together, how do you
pull the battery? That's just a matter of curiosity - the computer in
question is retired, maybe even lost (I forgot where I put it).


The retired unit is probably in the 'bozo' bin.



--
...winston
msft mvp consumer apps

On Mon, 26 Jan 2015 16:54:17 -0500, . . .winston wrote:

Gene E. Bloch wrote:


You made me think of a question, though. If you have an all-in-one such
as one of my old computers which seems to be glued together, how do you
pull the battery? That's just a matter of curiosity - the computer in
question is retired, maybe even lost (I forgot where I put it).


The retired unit is probably in the 'bozo' bin.

Since I can't remember what I did with it, maybe I qualify as the bozo.

Wouldn't be the first time :-)

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

On Mon, 26 Jan 2015 14:54:54 -0800, "Gene E. Bloch"
wrote:

On Mon, 26 Jan 2015 16:54:17 -0500, . . .winston wrote:

Gene E. Bloch wrote:


You made me think of a question, though. If you have an all-in-one such
as one of my old computers which seems to be glued together, how do you
pull the battery? That's just a matter of curiosity - the computer in
question is retired, maybe even lost (I forgot where I put it).


The retired unit is probably in the 'bozo' bin.

Since I can't remember what I did with it, maybe I qualify as the bozo.

Wouldn't be the first time :-)

A friend told me once that he wasn't worried when he couldn't find
something. He knew that someone else would find it after he dies, so it's
really only temporarily lost. He has since died, and his wife has been
finding things for nearly 4 years now.

Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On Mon, 26 Jan 2015 14:48:08 +0000, Tim w wrote:

On 25/01/2015 22:22, Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On Sun, 25 Jan 2015 00:25:55 +0000, Tim w wrote:

On 24/01/2015 22:06, Tim w wrote:
This could be the end of this little episode.
[...]

Actually not the end, I fixed it. Something called 'Resetting the
Embedded Controller', ffs.

Tim w
ISTR recent comments in one of the Windows groups about drive or drive
controller hardware getting into a locked or otherwise dysfunctional
state requiring resetting by (e.g.) actually removing power from the
electronics.

That may be what you were experiencing.

Yes, inability to boot from a usb CD drive is still unexplained. The
webpages I looked at suggested that loss of keyboard was a result of a
messed up Embedded Controller (itself a result of an unsuccessful and
unecessary attempt to update the BIOS in the hope of getting access to
the usbCD). It was fixed by a simple battery pull procedure. I had never
heard of an EC.

Tim w

Embedded Controller just means built into the mother board or CPU,
rather than being on a plugged in card, so you probably knew of the
concept but not the word :-)

You made me think of a question, though. If you have an all-in-one such
as one of my old computers which seems to be glued together, how do you
pull the battery? That's just a matter of curiosity - the computer in
question is retired, maybe even lost (I forgot where I put it).


There's "embedded" and "really embedded".

The "really embedded" ones, you never knew they existed,
and they cannot be flash upgraded.

From a SuperI/O data sheet, regarding your PS/2 keyboard...

"The keyboard controller is based on 8042 compatible
instruction set with a 2K Byte programmable ROM and a
256-Byte RAM bank. Keyboard BIOS firmware are available
with optional AMIKEY-2, Phoenix MultiKey/42, or
customer code."

Exactly what that does for us, I haven't a clue. But it's
descended from the mists of time... It used to be a separate
chip.

Apparently, so much computer science is involved with
that one, that somebody wrote a book :-)

http://www.amazon.com/PC-8042-Keyboa.../dp/0929392213

And now, that thing hides inside the SuperIO, so it isn't
a standalone chip.

http://wiki.osdev.org/%228042%22_PS/2_Controller

*******

A hard drive has a processor onboard.
Some SSD drives have multi-core processors (like ARM).
An optical drive, has a chipset with processor, and in some
cases, two separate firmware loads (can be updated separately).

Some Intel chipsets have a controller in the chipset, capable
of listening to an Intel branded NIC for "magic packets" and
taking control of the computer. Q-series chipsets are capable
of being reset from a crash, and updated by IT departments, with
no human present (scary...).

Some USB Wifi dongles, there is a processor in the MAC
chip, capable of doing "keep alive" while the computer
sleeps. And also of supporting Wake On LAN over Wifi.

Processors are used any place that discrete logic gate
design would be too complex and bug prone. On the
down side, a processor based solution wastes more power.

Paul


Paul