More Adventures in UEFI world - MSI P45D3 Platinum

The past week I've been testing booting on various motherboards and systems with a UEFI BIOS to see what we need to support booting a graphics card. 

I've tested an assortment of systems, Dell T1600, and T3600, HP Z620, HP 8200 Elite, Lenovo M91, my intel reference board, the DX58SO, some ASUS F1A75-V PRO motherboard, HP Z820, and HP Z210.  Mostly they all behaved the same.

Then I remembered our first UEFI motherboard, that we used to develop our first UEFI BIOS.  This was the trusted MSI P45D3 Platinum.  However when I booted on the system, I realized that the motherboard had it's most recent BIOS - which sadly was an old school AMI BIOS. After doing some research on forums, it appeared that the latest UEFI BIOS for this motherboard was version 1.43. I had no luck getting it off the MSI global site, their site seemed down most of the day.  One of our interns, who happens to have taken German, managed to find the BIOS I needed on the German MSI site.

One I had the BIOS installed, I realized that the only setting that would permit me to install windows in UEFI mode was to boot to 'EFI shell". So I did.  From the shell, I figured out how to load the DVD and while it took several installs and changing hard disks multiple times. But in the end I did install Windows 8 64 bits in UEFI mode on the MSI P45D3 Platinum motherboard.

After which I tested the BIOS I was supposed to test and found a bug when changing settings in the "click bios". Writing this blog made me realize I had a few more tests to do. :)

Where I'm particularly pleased is that I've been looking for information about setting up the MSI P45D3 motherboard, and all I found in forums is that people could not get it going with an OS in UEFI mode. That it would hang part of the way.  But they were trying with Vista 64, which is not so compatible with later GPT capable operating systems.