ASUS H61M MoBo will not boot existing Win 7 64

[Tim Hicks]

I am in trouble. I have been building and rebuilding PC's since the 1987, and I've not been in a situation like this.

I had a pre-UEFI ASUS motherboard and it was running Win 7 64-bit. I have a single WD SATA drive.

I just bought a ASUS H61M-A motherboard (UEFI) with 2x4GB memory and a Core i3 CPU. I carefully checked the specs several times before the purchase.

I was thinking that I'd swap out the motherboard CPU etc, and go about my merry way. Wrong.

The Motherboard sees all the hardware. At first I tried just booting up, but the boot failed after initial Windows load. Then I fell back to the Repair utility that purports to fix boot problems. It fails. I went back in the BIOS and disabled everything I could see of UEFI, set it to boot non-Windows. I have tried repair repeatedly but it always fails. I also booted from the Win7 distro DVD and get the same result. I tried rolling back to a previous version and that failed too.

I found a "Compatibility Support Module" in the BIOS and tried enabling it and disabling any UEFI support in the bootable devices. Same result.

I am hoping that it's something in the BIOS settings, but looking around I see a lot of pain and suffering with UEFI.

Can anyone help? Or at least point me in the right direction?

- Tim

 

[computer_nugget2]

do you know what the specs were to old computer?

 

[Tim Hicks]

For anyone else in this situation: UEFI is essentially not backward-compatible. It's a scheme that only benefits the PC companies by forcing an upgrade.

To get out of my situation, I had to:

1) Take the PC completely apart and remove the new CPU, motherboard and memory.
2) Rebuild the PC with its old hardware.
3) Boot the PC and run Windows Easy Transfer.
4) Take the PC apart again and rebuild with the new hardware.
5) Install Win7 from scratch, including reformatting the disk.
6) Run four hours worth of Windows Update to get it current.
7) Run Windows Easy Transfer to restore user accounts and data.
8) Reinstall all applications.

All I can say is that Windows Easy transfer was the shining star in this mess. It made the process relatively easy, and reinstalling apps from the list in Easy Transfer was extremely helpful.

BUYERS BEWARE OF UEFI. THERE IS NO REAL "UPGRADE" WITH UEFI. YOU MUST BE PREPARED TO REBUILD YOUR PC FROM SCRATCH. SHAME ON THE HARDWARE COMPANIES FOR NOT MAKING THIS CLEAR TO PROSPECTIVE BUYERS.