Uefi Legacy Bios

[Suk Harian]

@ dbeato. Interesting read from Dell on the subject. Presumably, they can leave the legacy boot selection in the BIOS because you could fit an Intel 6 CPU and then it would be useful? Confusing. Is it a Windows and Intel restriction or could you boot a non Windows OS on legacy BIOS with Intel 7/8?

5060 7060 3060 no longer have legacy bios. Similar Lenovo machines like P330 Tiny still have this option.
But will have to check if it also works for the internal storage. We just went for UEFI on them the first time around.

I have been wanting to switch to Linux for many years, and I finally took the step to download a Fedora 30 KDE live CD iso (actually USB) and give a try installing it. Since this is the computer I use for work, I want to keep a dual-boot system with Windows 7, at least during a transition period. The installation has not been successful though, and after spending all day today trying to figure out what might be the problem I found this video: Install Fedora 23 in Legacy Mode (Dual Boot Windows 7/8/10) - YouTube which was very helpful.

So my USB boots in UEFI mode, but I would like to install it in legacy BIOS mode. Is there any way to do this? Can I burn the USB in a different way so that it would boot in legacy mode, or can I add a configuration switch somewhere?

is there a way to change this command to make it run the legacy mode? i tried changing linuxefi to linux and initrdefi to initrd and run Ctrl-x, and the system did start, but I get the same errors as before with anaconda still trying to install and EFI system.

In my bios at least i can choise the option 1 or 2. If i select the option 1 i am only disponible to install in UEFI mode so that when I place the usb only can see UEFI:USB install. If I choise the option 2 I will can choise into 2 options when I place the USB:

I think you do need check your configuration into the BIOS. The only thing what is strange to me about it that you did comment is what if you can run only UEFI How is windows 7 loading in mode BIOS, it is what is chocking me.

Yes, I went to my HP BIOS manual and I double checked that the settings are enabled to be able to run both. As my boot loader is a bit fucked up atm, I need to get to the BIOS boot menu to start the system anyways, and the options I can choose there are (the comments in parenthesis are mine) :

Yes!!!
Thank you so much. The USB that RUFUS burned finally was able to be loaded in legacy BIOS mode and after that it was a 10 minute smooth ride to a successfull installation. Now I have a fully functional dual boot.

Total noob.
Puppy looks best best for a semi rugged tetratab portable running intel atom, reasonable speed, ram, disk etc but legacy bios only. Download for ubuntu bionic gives me bionicpup32-8.0-uefi.iso which I assume is suitable for a UEFI machine... any advice regarding whether worth trying this on the legacy machine or should I try one of the other distros?
thanks in advance!
Steve

Hello,

Recent AMD GPUs have a hybrid ROM which contains two images: A legacy video BIOS (vBIOS) image and a compressed graphics output protocol (GOP) driver image. In theory this allows the card to work well on both legacy systems (which will use the vBIOS image) and more modern systems with a unified extensible firmware interface (UEFI) compatible pre-boot firmware architecture (which use the GOP driver).

However some early UEFI implementations cannot cope with the hybrid BIOS, they try to load the GOP driver and fail, hanging at boot with a blank screen. I have personally experienced this with an AMD RX480 and an Alienware Aurora R3 system (other examples: RX 480 incompatibility thread on reddit, R3 with an RX580, another R3 with an RX480)

It is a particular problem for branded systems with custom motherboards like many systems from HP, Dell, Lenovo etc that no longer receive BIOS updates from the manufacturer and have no options within the BIOS to force legacy mode boot when an EFI module is detected.

Some older video cards have a physical switch on them to swap between legacy and UEFI mode. The RX 480 however has no switch and exposes both the legacy and the GOP images to the pre boot firmware. I found that by modifying the firmware ROM for my GPU to mark the legacy image as the "last" image it would hide the GOP image and render the system bootable.

Here is what I did (cross posted from the AMD and Nvidia GOP update thread):

Below is an example showing how I modified ROM of my card at offset 0xE568 in the the padding at the end of the legacy vBIOS image to balance the checksum so it would match the checksum of the original BIOS. You can also see the start of the next image (the GOP UEFI driver) which begins at 0xE600:

@drbob: Did you try Polaris BIOS editor (just do small mod like +1 MHz on core)? This utility will damge AMD EFI signature and card will no longer boot up in UEFI mode. You will also need AMD/ATI Pixel Clock Patcher for patching drivers..

i got an RX480 8gb armor OC, just sitting on the shelf for 6 months now, please can anyone mod the bios for me, i know how to flash but im not familiar with Hex, i have attached the bios file, thanks a lot ,in case if the file is corrupt ill provide a link below

Hello, from a security point of view is UEFI or legacy bios better to have in Qubes? When I installed legacy I had no problems, but with UEFI I had to comment out noexitboot and mapbs, I also had to manually make my ssd bootable with my bios, and I apparently have to do that set up every time Kernel and Xen get updated.

I think you (we) may get more useful answers by separating both topics. The simplest option would likely be to keep the UEFI vs Legacy boot here and open a new topic for Leak proof VPN. Could you please do that?

For reference: This is not explicitly called out in the FAQ, but is directly related to the guideline Keep It Tidy. It is a lot easier to separare topics early on, than it is to untangle a stream of interleaved replies!

If all this sounds worrying to you, it should.
The only widely used alternative is something like coreboot - you can
use Tianocore as a payload and have some features of UEFI. Coreboot
is only available for a limited range of machines. Not just classic
Lenovos: System76, Purism and some chromebooks are good.

So before I attempt to install fyde os on my laptop I just want to know whether its gonna boot up in legacy bios(my bios is locked with a password so I cant change to uefi), a guy suggested to use the vm version idk how true this is but yeah, I downloaded the right variant for my laptop its an hp elitebook 8470p kinda old I know. Anyways will it boot up or no?

How much ram is usable after upgrading to 8 GiB? I own an E330 as well and i can only access 3.2 GiB on arch64 using UEFI (legacy bios completely disabled).can you post the output ofdmesg grep -i memory?

The WLAN card seems to be a very cheep model. I guess we can replace it with a Intel Centrino 6300 module allowing 450MBit/s but loosing Bluetooth. There are rumours some bios prevent such an upgrade though.

Afair my model has Bios 1.12 version. Not sure if an update to 1.14 is possible. That FreeDos model seems pretty strange and not widely sold.--My notebook doesn't switch off its display using xscreensaver going into plain black mode. Is there any additional settings requiredto make it properly use DPMS?

I can't get 3.19 to work well with backlight control. The only way to make it poorly work is to apply acpi_osi="!Windows 2012" to the kernel boot parameters and keep thinkpad_acpi module blacklisted. Anyone with a good solution? _bug.cgi?id=94561

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