UEFI boot, Windows 7 install and Intel Smart Response (SSD caching) on Asrock Z68 Fatal1ty Pro
I have drives in my system > 2TB in size and thus I needed to be able to use GPT partition tables to access partitions above 2.2TB, the maximum limit of a MBR partition. There is very little information out there on installing Windows 7 to run on GPT disks, and what is there is frequently incomplete or wrong. There are also a bunch of "gotchas" with the Asrock Z68 Fatal1ty board that make for some head scratching, so I thought I would share my experiences and hopefully save those of you who want to do the same thing some hours of trying to puzzle it out.
If you're contemplating a GPT disk structure, here are some things you need to know: If you want a GPT partitioned disk in a UEFI BIOS system (even if it's only your data drive), then your boot disk MUST be GPT as well. This means you MUST do a UEFI boot of the Windows 7 install media and doing a UEFI boot of the Windows 7 install media on this board is a lot trickier than you might expect.
First off, do not hang your optical drive off one of the ASMedia SATA ports. It will NOT UEFI boot. The optical drive absolutely needs to be attached to the Intel controller. Secondly, simply going into the BIOS and setting up the optical drive as the first in the boot order will not work either, even if you see it prefaced by "UEFI: " in the list. What you MUST do is to hit the F11 key at boot time which will bring up the boot menu. Here you select the optical drive. In my case, since I have the Intel controller set in RAID mode, the boot list showed me two ways to boot the optical drive, "RAID: " and "UEFI: . It is key to note here that the BIOS seems to do some kind of check on the media to see if it is UEFI bootable. If there is a DVD in the drive that is not UEFI bootable, the option to boot "UEFI: " will not be displayed. Only if your media is UEFI bootable will you see the option in the F11 boot list.
I simply could not get my original Windows 7 Home Premium install media to UEFI boot (so the BIOS option in the F11 menu to UEFI boot the optical drive was not available). If you boot up in legacy BIOS mode, Windows install will refuse to install on a GPT disk, telling you that it is unable to do so. Only by booting in UEFI mode will you be able to install to a GPT disk. The solution to this problem for me was to create an install media that only allowed UEFI boot. To do this, you will need a copy of the Microsoft tool oscdimage.exe, which you can
download from the link in this
forum post. Make a copy of the install DVD to a work area on another PC and then issue the command
Code:
Code:
oscdimg -e -o -os -m -n -pEF -w4 -lWIN7X64UEFI -b"<path to copy of install media>\efi\microsoft\boot\efisys.bin" "<path to copy of install media>" "<filename for output iso>"
credit to Keshav for the method.
This will create a UEFI-boot-only ISO image which you will need to burn to DVD. Once you have this DVD, with the optical drive attached to an Intel controller SATA port, press the F11 button during startup and you should then see the option to UEFI boot the optical drive. If you select it, the BIOS will ask you to press a key to boot the DVD. If you see Windows starting, you will know you have just UEFI booted as you have disabled normal BIOS booting on this install media.
Once you get into the Windows setup and reach the screen where you choose the disk on which to install your copy of Windows, press Shift-F10 to run a command shell. Once in the command shell, run diskpart.exe. When presented by the "DISKPART >" prompt, you will need to check to see if the disk you want to install on is flagged as GPT or MBR.
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Code:
DISKPART > list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
--------- ------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 1500 GB 1500 GB
Disk 1 Online 750 GB 750 GB *
If you do not see an asterisk under the GPT header, then your disk is in MBR mode and you need to convert it to GPT. To do this, issue the following commands (assuming we want to convert disk 0 to GPT)
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Code:
DISKPART> select disk 0
Disk 0 is now the selected disk.
DISKPART > convert gpt
DISKPART> exit
DO NOT create any partitions. You will find a bunch of instructions on the web on how to create GPT partitions, but the Windows install process will create the necessary efisys, msres and msdata partition types automatically during the install process. Return to the install screen and hit refresh to refresh the list of drives and partitions. Here is also where you should load the ASMedia SATA drivers from a USB key. Choose the disk you just converted as the install disk and continue.
Once the install process completes, your GPT drive will be partitioned with 3 partitions: an EFI system partition, of 100MB in size, a MSRES reserved partition of 128MB in size, and the MSDATA partition on the rest of the space. The first two partitions will not be visible inside Windows - you will need to run diskpart or a similar tool to be able to see them. When your PC reboots, be sure to set the 1st boot drive in the boot preference list to your install drive. DESPITE what you may read on the web, it will UEFI boot off a drive on the Intel controller when it is set to RAID mode. You will see posts telling you that AHCI must be the mode and that this therefore means that RAID mode and UEFI boot are incompatible, but this is incorrect.
Contrary also to what you might read on the web, Intel Smart Response technology DOES work on a UEFI boot Windows 7 x64 system, despite some reports that it is impossible and also despite a remark in the release notes for the RST drivers . The only caveat here is that I cannot confirm that it does cache properly on a boot drive. My drive setup is a 512GB Crucial m4 as the boot drive and four WD 1TB RE4s in RAID 10 mode with a 60GB OCZ Vertex 3 acting as the cache attached to the Intel controller and a 3TB WD Caviar Green, two 750GB Hitachi Deskstars and my optical drive attached to the ASMedia controller. Note that to install Windows 7 in UEFI boot mode, I disconnected my RAID array and attached the optical drive to the Intel controller. Once my install was done, I reconnected my RAID array to the Intel controller and moved the Optical drive to the ASMedia controller.
It's worth noting that I did not use the Intel RST drivers from the Asrock site (version 10.5.0.1027). Instead, I
downloaded the latest version (10.6.0.1002) directly from Intel. The release notes state that a known issue is that "3007138 Win7 -64 GPT formatted drives create error message in user interface when RRT creation is attempted". I did not encounter this error, perhaps because I used the Intel BIOS to create my RAID array rather than the Intel Windows Management GUI. Once Windows was installed, I installed the latest version of the Intel RST drivers, then I went to the Intel management GUI, chose the accelerate option for my RAID array, selected my OCZ Vertex 60GB as the SSD to use for the cache. It duly informed me that the acceleration was enabled. Once this was done, I went to the Manage tab and selected "initialize" to initialize the RAID array. Once this was complete, I created and formatted a volume on the RAID array.
And several hours later, all was working as envisaged, but not without some definite head scratching and cursing along the way though.
UPDATE:
Here's some more useful information. I had to RMA my board because of faulty onboard audio connectors. When I put in the new motherboard, it simply would not boot my GPT installation of Windows 7 on my Crucial M4 512GB SSD boot drive. One of the hallmarks of a UEFI installation of Windows 7 is that you will see in the boot devices section in the bios an entry called "Windows Boot Manager". I did not see this entry. The solution is to boot an EFI shell off a USB key. Then change to the correct disk and execute the boot loader.
Code:
Code:
> fs0:
> cd EFI/boot
> bootx64.efi
It will then boot into your Windows installation. When you reboot and go into the bios, you will now see "Windows Boot Manager" as one of the boot disk options. It seems the bios does not see the GPT installation until you have booted from it at least once. Choose this as your first boot drive and you will be able to boot.
For those of you who need an EFI boot usb key, I've uploaded one
here. Just unpack this to the root of a FAT32 USB key. Do not attempt to invoke this using the bios option. Just put it in a USB port, hit F11 at the bios splash screen, choose the UEFI: USB option and you will boot into the EFI shell on the USB key where you can enter the commands above.
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