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theBitz View Drop Down
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Joined: 17 Apr 2017
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    Posted: 08 Sep 2017 at 6:20am
Two of my options in the UEFI are "Windows Boot Manager (Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB)" and "Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB."  They are now 1st and 2nd in the boot order on my ASRock H270M Pro 4 mother board and I obviously boot the the SSD.  Appreciate if someone would explain the difference and should I have both listed in that order? 
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Originally posted by theBitz theBitz wrote:

Two of my options in the UEFI are "Windows Boot Manager (Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB)" and "Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB."  They are now 1st and 2nd in the boot order on my ASRock H270M Pro 4 mother board and I obviously boot the the SSD.  Appreciate if someone would explain the difference and should I have both listed in that order? 


First a few questions mainly for my information:

Did you install Windows 10 (I assume?) from an Windows ISO on a USB flash drive?

Did you configure any options in the UEFI/BIOS for installing Windows?

Did you check or select the entry of your installation media in the boot order when you installed Windows?

Both of the entries in the boot order are valid, and work fine. It is normal for the way I'm guessing your installed Windows for both of them to be in the boot order (hints in your post.)

The Windows Boot Manager (Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB) entry is the UEFI booting entry for your OS installation. That means it uses the Windows EFI boot loader.

The Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB entry is the Legacy/MBR entry for your OS installation. It's using the non-UEFI legacy Windows MBR boot loader. You may find your 960 EVO is GPT partitioned, but it still has a hidden MBR system/boot partition. Did that entry have a prefix of "AHCI:"?

As an advocate of actually using the UEFI firmware in our boards (CSM set to Disabled), and of UEFI booting, I only use the Windows Boot Manager entry on all of my PCs.

Legacy booting with CSM set to Enabled (the default) causes our board's firmware to run in emulated BIOS mode, using 16bit addressing and 1MB (yes, MegaByte) of our memory during the POST process. That's the BIOS firmware standard from 1998.

It seems you booted your Window installation media that had the "UEFI" prefix with the device name, rather than without that prefix, in the boot order. The UEFI: entry is usually by default at the top of the boot order list. Otherwise you would not have a Windows Boot Manager entry. But you seem to not have otherwise configured your Windows installation for UEFI booting.

It preferable to use the EFI bootloader with NVMe SSDs, but not required. Depending upon how you installed Windows, and as long as you are not using Windows 7 and depending upon your video source, you may be able to use the Windows Boot Manager entry, if you are interested.

The Windows Boot Manager entry is not wrong or a bug. It indicates the more modern way of booting Windows 10 or 8.1.
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