N76VZ BIOS question

Hello,

I have a question regarding the BIOS of this notebook. I have V207 and there's no "UEFI Boot" option on the BOOT setup page.

Could anyone who also owns this notebook check if this option is available on his? The first option for me is "Launch PXE OpROM".

ASUS SUpport told me that it's supposed to be there, and that my notebook might be defective. That's kind of hard to believe so I'd like to make sure before sending it in.

Thanks,
Rainer

 

..pretty sure they just hid the option, and use efi as 1st default. If there's no efi/gpt partition present, it moves to mbr on the first bootable disk.

I'm sure they would manage to lock the second options if they wanted to, though. After trying a couple of times, most likely, since that's the default from AMI, but still...

 

According to their support it's not supposed to be hidden, and it's in the manual. I even had to send them a screenshot. Kinda weird.

At the moment an MBR on the first HDD gets ignored since there's a Windows EFI partition. If I install grub on the 2nd HDD I can boot that.

Still, I would like to be in control here and be able to disable UEFI if I have to.

 

Yeah. Would be nice, wouldn't it. :/ No, the asus support person just hasn't been informed of that the second bios release changed the settings from the first bios. So that the settings don't correspond to the manual any more.

Like one of them said about the locked sata2 setting on the n55x and earlier notebooks (that still hasn't been undone, even though it undeniably would work perfectly fine). "It could have been locked for any number of different reasons". None of which he could mention right there on the spot, of course. Hopefully there'll be a few certain things they will change in the next bios-update for the n56/76..

..solution in the meantime might be to just use the efi loader, and install efi-grub. That should be smooth sailing, since you can boot the second disk, and so on. If you're feeling adventurous, take a look at rEFIt. It actually works really well from an usb, at least. And will boot any efi-boot on available disks and nearby devices. Pretty neat.

But you would need to install efi-grub to be able to boot from rEFIt.

 

Yeah, I also guess that they have hidden the option. That's why I had contacted support in the first place, to complain! Ah well.

Creating an extra FAT partition for a boot loader, not very cool IMHO. The linux EFI solutions are not 100% either yet AFAIK.

Since I have 2 HDDs I can live with the dual-boot. I only have to let it boot from the 2nd one where my grub is.

Booting from a USB stick however has become pretty difficult, sometimes I have to reboot 3 or 4 times before it gets recognized. :/

Desperately hoping for a new BIOS as well.

 

Hit the esc-key on the first asus-screen. Works most of the time - then you can pick the device to boot from.

EFI-grub should work to boot into, at least. Chainloading other efi-boots is worse, specially Windows doesn't work. Therefore, using rEFIt as the main loader - test it via an usb-boot first, for example, is probably the easiest way.

 

Even in the ESC boot drive selection menu the USB thumb drive seldom shows up.

Do you still have the UEFI boot option in your N56VZ BIOS?

I still need a 100% confirmation that it has been removed, otherwise the support guy would ask me to send in my notebook