Challenged adoption to BootIt UEFI environment

[jcqcomm@gmail.com]

Hello experts and learners alike,

I have been with BootIt since the early days, even before Next Generation and I was well adept in making it sing and dance in the MBR environment. At one point my mid tower had 6 HDD with the various OS, backup copies of OS and old versions of OS at the ready of a click on the menu.

Now with a young Lenovo P53 laptop whose environment is Win10 Pro and all UEFI I am finding out that my transition is far from intuitive, and I can't quite put my eyes on a tutorial that outlines the workings of UEFI and where relevant boot parameters are located.

But I am also one of those learners that will figure out most anything once I have a working sample in hand. So along that ability, I will post the following request:

My P53 came with one 1TB SSD, and I added a second SSD at 2TB

I copied the OS that came with the laptop as a partition copy through bootit as the first and only OS on the second SSD. First I copied all 4 partitions, but I already learned that there should only be one EFI partition om a computer, regardless how may physical disks, so I removed the copy and gave the original one 450mb of space (up from 100MB)

Would someone with the knowledge be so kind to take the time to present
step by step, click by click, edit by edit, entry by entry the full (and best) procedure to clone the working OS from SSD 1 onto SSD 2, and make it bootable with its own menu item on the opening screen?

I have been through the manual and through the various postings. Most postings are suggestions to resolve issues. I have not reached the point to where I can investigate issues with the knowledge that all needed prior steps and entries for such a copy have been properly, and completely executed.

If this already tutorial already exists, of course, a pointer or a link to that resource would be much appreciated, but as you can probably derive, I I have a 10, or twenty step guidance that I can follow, I would have a paved path to success, or at least a paved path to something on which any exceptions can be diagnosed and identified.

Many thanks to the courageous code warrior who is willing to step forward and assist,

Best regards,

John

[Brian K]

John,

See viewtopic.php?t=4141&start=10

Go to the reply starting with "With BIBM you disconnect HD0 when you install an OS to an alternate drive. You don't do this with BIU."

Ignore the part about installing Windows. You already have Windows and BIU installed.

[jcqcomm@gmail.com]

Brian, hello, and thank you for that quick post.

The laptop I bought used did not come with a windows disk so I want to reset the OS to factory fresh using the restore partition.
But, before I do that, I wish to preserve the existing OS, at least for a while, exactly as it came with the laptop. Tot that end, I seek to CLONE the OS that is already there. Then I would like to make (or keep) it bootable, so I can a version of the Win10 OS as it came on the laptop upon delivery.

While i could achieve my starting point at this time by just installing win10 as a new install, the cloning option desired as it allows the creation of a "fork" with a mature OS with many, many updates already installed, preclusing the need for a fresh install each time an additional copy of the licensed OS is needed.

I am not sure how the multiple Microsoft.000 and Microsoft.001 folders play into this.

the closest i came was when I reinstalled BIU and received 4 menu items for Win 10. Two hung, and two booted, but the two that booted, both started the same original OS on SSD1 - It did not point to the clone, and thus booting up the clone is what continues to elude me.

[Brian K]

John,

I understand you have a Win10 partition on SSD1 and you would like to copy it to SSD2. It's easy as explained in my post. Any questions on the method.

Do you only have one item in Boot Edit at present. You had 2 at one stage.

You can forget about Microsoft.xxx folders at present. They hold the booting files for the relevant OS. Each Win10 will have it's own in the EFI folder in the EFI System Partition.

[jcqcomm@gmail.com]

Brian, many thanks for your posts,

I had to park my project for a few days, but having returned to it today, I can confirm that your outline has provided me with a 100% successfully booting clone. for the benefit of others who may encounter similar difficulties I would post the following addition:

I had deleted my clone copy more than once on my various failed trials. What I did different this time was to delete the failing entries from the boot menu, and allowing it to DELETE the associated boot files. After this, there was one item left on the boot menu that booted my original OS and partition. After this, Brian's instructions created a clone on the second SSD, and BIU created a second entry on the boot menu which I renamed. This new entry now successfully booted my cloned OS, (verified from the second SSD) as I sought to achieve.

Thank you again, Brian, for taking the time to respond to my post.

John

[Brian K]

John,

Nice. In Boot Edit, make a note of the Microsoft.xxx for each Boot Item. If you desire you can use TeraByte Explorer to delete any Micrososoft.xxx folders that aren't being used.

[ohaya1000]

John and Brian K,

I didn't read through everything above, but I didn't see any reference to a drive > 2TB, but assuming that that is true, shouldn't be ok to just use BIBM and EMBR instead of going toe UEFI and BIU and GPT (assuming that the machine BIOS allowed disabling secure boot or whatever it is called)?

I have 2 Dell laptops now, an old Precision and a new (bought in 12/2021, but only started trying to use the Vostro this weekend) and on the Precision, I had configured to disable secure boot and used only BIBM and EMBR partitions, so working with the Vostro has been kind jarring, and I now remember why I put off touching the Vostro for a year. I wanted to keep the Vostro as "Dell vanilla" as possible (for warranty reaons and recover support from Dell, etc.), but now that I am hands-on with it, I am thinking that I should go the same route as I did with the Precision (i.e., use BIBM and EMBR).

Isn't it only if we want to use > 2TB drives that we need to go to UEFI, etc., and also, even with external USB drives > 2TB we also still don't need UEFI?

I really can't envision using an internal drive in a laptop that NEEDS to be > 2TB.

Thanks,
Jim

[CyberSimian]

Isn't it only if we want to use > 2TB drives that we need to go to UEFI, etc., and also, even with external USB drives > 2TB we also still don't need UEFI?

My understanding is this:

(1) BIBM can boot only from an MBR disk.
(2) An MBR disk can access a maximum of 2TB. So if you use a larger disk, the excess space is wasted.
(3) BIBM can access GPT disks (so your system could have an MBR boot disk and a GPT data disk).
(4) BIBM cannot boot from an NVMe disk (I have tried this and it does not work reliably).

So, to use BIBM on a newish laptop, the boot disk would need to be a SATA disk of size 2TB or less. If your laptop has an M.2 NVMe disk, and only one disk slot, you would need to replace the M.2 NVMe disk with an M.2 SATA disk (but check first that the slot will accept a M.2 SATA disk -- not all do). If your laptop has two disk slots, install a SATA disk in the vacant slot (again check first that this will work), and make that the boot disk.

Earlier this year I purchased a Gigabyte Aorus laptop with a 1TB NVMe disk formatted as GPT and operating in UEFI mode. I installed a 512GB M.2 SATA disk in the other slot, made that the boot disk, installed BIBM, and changed the 1TB NVMe to a data disk (also MBR, since it is less than 2TB in size). If I ever need to replace the 1TB data disk with a larger disk (> 2TB), I would change that disk to GPT.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[TeraByte Support]

(1) BIBM can boot only from an MBR disk.
(2) An MBR disk can access a maximum of 2TB. So if you use a larger disk, the excess space is wasted.
(3) BIBM can access GPT disks (so your system could have an MBR boot disk and a GPT data disk).
(4) BIBM cannot boot from an NVMe disk (I have tried this and it does not work reliably).

1 - BIBM boots from an EMBR disk only.
2 - MBR/EMBR is 2TiB Max if logical sector size is 512 bytes. However the loader of BIBM needs 512 byte sectors.
3 - Yes for partition work it can be MBR/EMBR/GPT.
4 - BIBM can boot from any drive, including NVMe, who's controller has a BIOS. The BIOS interface is the same for all drives, that is the purpose, if there is a problem, it's with the BIOS (firmware). Some add-in adapters don't have BIOS support, some have it as an option to enable, the newer ones may be UEFI only.