MDT 2012 Beta 1: UEFI Support

re: MDT 2012 Beta 1: UEFI Support

JDUnn — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:12:52 GMT

I am using MDT2012, hosted on a Windows 2012 Server. I have native UEFI devices PXE booting correctly. However, when I cut the LiteTouch_x86.iso to a DVD, the UEFI devices don't boot. ON any device that is BIOS/UEFI mixed the DVD works, I beLeive that is due to the backward compatibilty of the mixed environment. The Native UEFI devices don't boot. Am I missing something?

re: MDT 2012 Beta 1: UEFI Support

ypae — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 01:47:51 GMT

I had to deal with UEFI compatibility issue with MDT 2010 today (particularly with Lenovo V570) and your MDT 2012b2 saved my day.

With MDT2010U1, I got the following error on Installing Windows screen:

"Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks."

But after I update the MDT 2010 share to MDT2012b2, it works like a charm.

Thanks again, Michael!

re: MDT 2012 Beta 1: UEFI Support

KJ — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 05:06:49 GMT

Do anyone successful boot PXE on efi shell 64 bit? Can i know steps to configure and boot in UEFI(Host is Linux(AMI bios) and client is efi shell bios.send email to kjsuraj2000@yahoo.com

re: MDT 2012 Beta 1: UEFI Support

Michael Niehaus — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:18:21 GMT

Yes, we make a Windows API call (GetFirmwareEnvironmentVariable) to determine if the machine is running UEFI. If that calls succeeds, we will set IsUEFI to true.

re: MDT 2012 Beta 1: UEFI Support

Nicholas Adrian — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 02:36:28 GMT

Michael, thank you for the information.

Out of curiosity, I checked IsUEFI in the MDT script (ZTIGather.wsf) and its originated from microsoft.bdd.utility.dll.

re: MDT 2012 Beta 1: UEFI Support

Michael Niehaus — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:33:55 GMT

MDT does automatically set a task sequence variable, IsUEFI, to indicate whether UEFI is present. This will only be true when not running in compatibility mode - if it is in compatibility mode, there's no way to tell the machine is UEFI-capable.

So the variable really indicates that the machine is running UEFI right now.

re: MDT 2012 Beta 1: UEFI Support

Nicholas Adrian — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:54:38 GMT

Is there a command, when boot in the winpe, to check whether the firmware was set to UEFI or BIOS?

re: MDT 2012 Beta 1: UEFI Support

Mike Morawski — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:59:57 GMT

This article opened my eyes to UEFI -- something I've heard about but never gave attention to. Thanks!

re: MDT 2012 Beta 1: UEFI Support

Michael Niehaus — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 03:50:24 GMT

USB drives are set up as "dual boot" by default. There's no real "boot sector" to worry about with USB.

However, the UEFI BIOS support for this is rather inconsistent and not always clear either. For example, on a Dell laptop, you have to know to choose the rather obtusely-named entry in the boot menu, rather than the "boot from CD" entry higher in the list. And that's the easy one - on an HP laptop, you have to navigate to the bootx64.efi file using a text-based file browser...

-Michael

re: MDT 2012 Beta 1: UEFI Support

Johnnie — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:26:07 GMT

We use USB flash drives instead of burning CDs. How would make the USB drives with dual “legacy” BIOS and UEFI boot sectors?