Final update – my BIOS configuration script had a command to temporarily disable BitLocker in case configuration was applied from already deployed OS. Good old manage-bde –protectors –disable C:
However this command unexpectedly applied BitLocker to FAT32 boot volume. When querying status with manage-bde -status there is no encryption. However volume is actually encrypted. Booting to WinPE on next start would clear encryption so it only showed up when using Linux live media. Duh!
Why would it do that? Don’t know. In the end HP BIOS boots just fine and does not require ESP partition. I edited title to reflect on the actual issue.
Hold your horses! All information below is irrelevant as HP desktop BIOS seems to have a bug. It will not properly enumerate UEFI boot drives after mode switch. It may boot sometimes but not consistently. Currently only workaround is to boot to PXE after mode switch and restart TS.
So I was looking at this great guide on conversion from BIOS to UEFI boot in SCCM TS.
However my BIOS/UEFI configuration is more locked down and HP professional desktops flat out refuse to boot from plain FAT32 partitions with some options set. I’m guessing it’s because of Removable Media Boot: Disable. But still I needed to work around that. After some tinkering I discovered that boot worked fine if partition was set as EFI boot partition. However this caused WinPE to not mount it at boot. No mount, no task sequence data, fail.
So I created 2 partitions, first for EFI boot, second for WinPE. Then I configured BCD to point to second partition and set first as EFI boot partition. Boom, it works!
Notes:
As always, could be more efficient but good enough…My configuration is a bit different. I have both x86 and amd64 WinPE data in one package (in subfolders) to support both 32bit and 64bit UEFI implementations in one package and I select relevant boot set with %PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE% variable. Package download size is bigger but that’s not an issue for me. This also implies that PXE WinPE image must be the same as target architecture.In “Format and Partition Disk” step create 2 Primary partitions. First must be smaller than the second one (for example 2GB and 4GB). This is necessary as TS data is stored on the larger partition and EFI partition will not be mounted on next boot. Set first partition variable to EfiDrive and second to BootDriveCall WinPE deployment script ascopy.cmd %EfiDrive% %BootDrive%
Modified copy.cmd
@ECHO OFF set efidrive=%1 ::S: set bootdrive=%2 ::C: XCOPY %~dp0%PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE%\* /s /e /h %bootdrive%\ ::https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh265131%28v=ws.10%29.aspx xcopy %bootdrive%\EFI\* %efidrive%\EFI\* /cherkyfs copy %bootdrive%\windows\boot\EFI\*.efi %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\* del %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD /f bcdedit -createstore %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -create {bootmgr} /d "Boot Manager" bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -create {globalsettings} /d "globalsettings" bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -create {dbgsettings} /d "debugsettings" bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -create {ramdiskoptions} /d "ramdiskoptions" for /f "Tokens=3" %%A in ('bcdedit /store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD /create /application osloader') do set PEStoreGuid=%%A bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD /default %PEStoreGuid% bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -set {bootmgr} device partition=%efidrive% bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -set {bootmgr} path \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -set {bootmgr} locale en-us bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -set {bootmgr} timeout 10 bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -set {Default} device ramdisk=[%bootdrive%]\sources\boot.wim,{ramdiskoptions} bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -set {Default} path \windows\system32\winload.efi bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -set {Default} osdevice ramdisk=[%bootdrive%]\sources\boot.wim,{ramdiskoptions} bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -set {Default} systemroot \windows bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -set {Default} winpe yes bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -set {Default} nx optin bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -set {Default} detecthal yes bcdedit -store %efidrive%\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD -displayorder {Default} -addfirst diskpart /s "%~dp0diskpartefiboot.txt"
diskpartefiboot.txt
Voilà! It boots!
…occasionally on some systems fastfat driver doesn’t load. It’s load type is 3 – manual (ondemand). Partitions are shown as RAW and TS will fail as data cannot be loaded. Investigating.