EFI Preboot Guidelines and Windows 8 UEFI Secure Boot for HP Business Notebooks and Desktops PPS Business Notebook and Desktop Technical white paper

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EFI preboot guidelines

As computer technology has advanced, the BIOS has expanded to handle new components, larger and more complex

chipsets, add-in cards, and other enhancements. This expansion has made the BIOS increasingly intricate.

Development of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the computer industry’s solution to BIOS limitations. EFI is a

set of modular interfaces that replaces the set of traditional BIOS interfaces between the OS and platform firmware.

EFI is derived from high-level C language, is driver-based, scalable, and is easy to debug and upgrade. EFI uses a

modular, platform-independent architecture that can perform boot and other BIOS functions. HP employs this

technology to implement an EFI partition on all of its business notebook and desktop computers.

Along with replacing

the traditional BIOS interface, the HP EFI partition adds tools to the preboot system environment.

The HP EFI partition is viewable on the hard drive, labeled as HP_TOOLS. Starting with 2008, HP business notebook and

desktop platforms that included the EFI BIOS, HP created the EFI partition as a FAT32 primary partition, due to EFI

limitations with accessing other partition formats. These guidelines include specifications for the Windows® 8 (Win8) OS.

All mentions of notebooks and desktops in this document reference HP business notebooks and desktops. For more

information about EFI, go to http://www.hp.com/go/techcenter.

Supported models

Beginning with 2012 models, the following HP business notebook and desktop computers support EFI Preboot

Guidelines and Win8 UEFI Secure Boot:

 2012 HP EliteBook p series

 2012 HP ProBook b series

 2012 HP ProBook m series

 2012 HP ProBook s series

 2012 HP Compaq 8300 Elite series

 2012 HP Compaq 6300 Pro series

 2012 HP Compaq 6305 Pro series

HP_TOOLS for HP EFI and preboot applications

Partitions and directory paths for preboot deliverables have changed in Win8. Table 1 shows the Win8 changes.

Table 1: Preboot deliverables with partition and directory paths for Win7 and Win8

Component

Win 7 partition name and folder path

(MBR)

Win 8 partition name and folder path (GPT)

BIOS images

[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-PACKARD/BIOS

[/New, /Current, /Previous]

[ESP] /EFI/HP/BIOS [/New, /Current,

/Previous]

UEFI Bios Update

[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-

PACKARD/BiosUpdate

[ESP] /EFI/HP/ BiosUpdate

System Diagnostics

[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-

PACKARD/SystemDiags

[ESP] /EFI/HP/SystemDiags

Language

[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-PACKARD

/Language

[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-PACKARD

/Language

Custom Logo

[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-PACKARD/Logo

SpareKey Language

[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-PACKARD/SpareKey

SecureHV

[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-PACKARD/SecureHV

Except for the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC.