Booting a UEFI bios with no discs

[Paul P]

I'm in the process of building my first computer. I'd like to boot it initially without any disks or OS just to make sure things work that far and to play around with the BIOS without having to worry about anything else.

My ASUS P9x79ws motherboard has a UEFI bios. I understand that part of a UEFI bios resides on disk. I imagine to do what I want I'll have to make a bootable USB drive, which I've done before but not for UEFI.

I can't seem to find a how-to guide to making a bootable usb drive with the proper UEFI file(s) on board.

Or can I boot to the basic bios and get the uefi file(s) from usb drive as a second step ?

Thanks.

 

[alvine]

I have not messed with UEFI bios, but if you want to "test" your build you can download and burn an iso of ubuntu linux for example

With the amounts of builds I have done I just install windows after the build is done with some degree of cable management. After windows is loaded up i begin with prime 95 for cpu stress testing and core temp for temperature readings to see if the heatsink is seated correctly/ no crazy high temperatures showing

 

[ram1009]

If I were you I would simply try entering the BIOS and see what happens.

 

[geofelt]

A UEFI bios does not reside on disk so far as I know. It is entirely contained in the bios chip.

Just start up the pc, and enter the bios and look around.

My usual first test before loading the OS is to run memtest86+
Download it to a cd, usb, or floppy.
It does not need an os to run.

 

[DJDeCiBeL]

I'm pretty sure no disk of any kind is required to boot to a UEFI BIOS.

Admittedly, I've only ever worked with one UEFI board (the one in my current rig), but it booted straight away to the UEFI BIOS without a bootable disk attached when I first built this rig (brand new unformatted HDD and no disk in the DVD drive).

Besides that, I've never heard of a BIOS (any type of BIOS) needing a drive attached to work. That would be ridiculous.

 

[Paul P]

Thanks for the replies.

I think I am getting confused between a UEFI bios and the EFI partition on a GPT partitioned drive.

I belive this partition can contain 'extensions' to a UEFI bios.

From : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface

Extensions

Extensions to EFI can be loaded from virtually any non-volatile storage device attached to the computer. For example, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) can distribute systems with an EFI partition on the hard drive, which would add additional functions to the standard EFI firmware stored on the motherboard's ROM.


Asus's wysiwyg BIOS interface looks so awsome that I figured it had to reside on some sort of storage.

Ok, I guess I'll just boot things up and see what happens.

 

[geofelt]

Originally, the bios had a simple interface because they were limited to the size of the chip. 4K, I think.
Today, that is no longer a restriction which is why they can have more code in the bios and give you a web like interface.