XPS Boot order sees media not device?

If you only disabled Secure Boot but kept the system booting in UEFI mode as opposed to switching it to full Legacy, then UEFI boot works very differently from the device-based Legacy BIOS mode it sounds like you're expecting.  On UEFI, certain devices like optical drives and network booting are listed as devices, but boot environments on actual hard drives don't appear as "Hard Drive 0", in fact I'm actually surprised you have a generic "USB Storage" device.  The way it works in UEFI is that the boot entries point to individual bootloader files, and those get registered into the UEFI firmware -- which is why you have an entry specifically called "Windows Boot Manager" rather than just "Such and such hard drive".  The reason flash drives can be booted without their environments having been registered is because when a UEFI system boots, it will scan any attached devices for a bootloader file at a path defined by the UEFI spec, namely \EFI\Boot\Bootx64.efi.

In terms of your question, I'm unclear why you feel you need to keep rearranging your boot order.  Presumably you want to boot normally to Windows most of the time, so why can't you just keep that at the top of your list and use the F12 one-time boot menu whenever you want to boot from a disc or flash drive?  That menu allows you to override the normal boot target and boot from whatever else you want instead, without needing to bump it to the top of the boot menu first.  Or since you mentioned backup and recovery applications, if what you're trying to say is that you have a bootable recovery environment for that application on your actual hard drive, i.e. not on an "external" device, then the "special" boot entry for that would actually reside inside the Windows BCD, which is the "Windows Boot Manager" entry you see in your BIOS.  Basically, the UEFI firmware is responsible for loading Windows Boot Manager, and then it's out of the picture.  At that point it's up to the Windows BCD to decide whether to load regular Windows or load some alternate bootable environment you may have elsewhere.  If you want to simplify accessing an environment like that, then open up msconfig within Windows, go to the Boot tab, and set a Timeout value of something other than 0 seconds.  That way Windows Boot Manager will always pause at its boot menu (which again is wholly separate from the UEFI boot menu) to ask whether you want to load Windows or something else, and it will proceed to the default choice if you don't respond.

Are you saying you can use the rest of the blank space for folders and such?  

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@Mal25wrote:

Yes,

 I have two physically separate USB devices that store separate bootable recovery environments.

Okay that makes sense, what I had expected was that if a boot disk was present in either device it would boot from it, and if not it would boot normally.  Further that if bootable media was detected it would be in either the CD/DVD/CD-RW or USB Storage options I created.

Thanks that is still very simple.

Chris

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The way you expected it to work is how it used to work in the Legacy BIOS world, but not in UEFI systems, at least not traditional UEFI systems.  Again, I'm surprised you even have a generic "USB Storage Device" entry anyway, which I agree does sort of suggest that if any sort of USB device is attached, then the system should try to boot from it.  But then again, that may not always be what you want.  I have a flash drive containing a bootable environment and some other stuff, so I'll usually want to be able to restart my system and have it return to Windows without getting sidetracked into the USB environment.  That's especially important if you ever want to be able to restart your PC remotely and have it come back up again (in Windows).  Basically, I'd rather have to press F12 on all of the relatively few occasions where I want to boot from USB instead of putting a rarely used "USB device" entry at the top of the boot order even if it did work the way you described.

Yes,

 I have two physically separate USB devices that store separate bootable recovery environments.

Okay that makes sense, what I had expected was that if a boot disk was present in either device it would boot from it, and if not it would boot normally.  Further that if bootable media was detected it would be in either the CD/DVD/CD-RW or USB Storage options I created.

Thanks that is still very simple.

Chris

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@Mal25wrote:

Are you saying you can use the rest of the blank space for folders and such?  

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You mean on your recovery flash drive?  Sure.  The files involved with the bootable environment need to be in a certain place and named a certain way in order for the flash drive to work as a boot device, but there's absolutely nothing stopping you from adding other files onto that drive.  I have a large flash drive with a folder called "Bootable Environments" in it, and inside there I have subfolders for several bootable environments, including installers for multiple versions of Windows, my Macrium Reflect restore environment, and a few other things.  When I need to boot one of them, I just move the contents of that subfolder onto the root of the drive so that it's bootable, then when I'm done I move all of that back into the correct subfolder -- all of which means that most of the time when I do NOT need that flash drive to be used as a bootable device, it's neat and tidy.  And then I have a folder called "Other" where I store everything else I want to have on that flash drive.

The one potential wrinkle would be if whatever program generated these bootable devices insisted on formatting your flash drive every time you updated it, which would erase everything on the flash drive.  It shouldn't do that, but it might anyway.

And lastly, I forgot to mention this earlier, but do you really need to disable Secure Boot in order for these USB environments to work?  Most of them are based on Windows PE, and Windows PE 4.0 and newer support Secure Boot.  If you haven't already, try enabling Secure Boot again and then test booting each of your USB devices.  If they both work, then leave Secure Boot on because it's a nice additional protection against rootkits.  There have been threads here where people learned they had been infected with a rootkit because all of a sudden they started seeing a warning that their bootloader signature no longer passed the Secure Boot check.  If one or both of your USB flash drives does NOT work while Secure Boot is enabled, then you may still want to keep it enabled most of the time and only disable it when you actually need to boot from a flash drive, but depending on how often you need to, that might become inconvenient.

Thanks,

I did as you suggested, boot order, secure boot and everything boots fine, USB & CD. That's a pretty big 360 I just pulled, however I did learn quite a bit, whenever tech support had me download an ISO they have said it must be the only thing on the drive, I guess that's to ensure there are no problems.  This sure simplifies the process and storage requirements, I had two 8 GB flash drives (smallest I could find) with 300 MB on each LOL.  One last thing if you don't mind Macrium is one of my programs, their ADK for download is version 1609, (we discussed this in an earlier post) the latest version is 1803 and I downloaded and installed 1709 (my version) do you think this will cause a problem if mine is one ahead of theirs?

Thanks for all the info, you cleared up a lot of fog, there's not a lot explaining the basic dos and don'ts out there.

Chris 

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@Mal25wrote:

Thanks,

I did as you suggested, boot order, secure boot and everything boots fine, USB & CD. That's a pretty big 360 I just pulled, however I did learn quite a bit, whenever tech support had me download an ISO they have said it must be the only thing on the drive, I guess that's to ensure there are no problems.  This sure simplifies the process and storage requirements, I had two 8 GB flash drives (smallest I could find) with 300 MB on each LOL.  One last thing if you don't mind Macrium is one of my programs, their ADK for download is version 1609, (we discussed this in an earlier post) the latest version is 1803 and I downloaded and installed 1709 (my version) do you think this will cause a problem if mine is one ahead of theirs?

Thanks for all the info, you cleared up a lot of fog, there's not a lot explaining the basic dos and don'ts out there.

Chris 

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Macrium Reflect's latest supported WinPE version is WinPE 10 1607.  Even if you downloaded the ADK for 1709, Reflect won't actually use it for building its Rescue Media.  It will stick to 1607, either by pulling the required files from your installed ADK if you have that specific version installed, or else downloading the 1607 files directly from Microsoft on its own.  So no, having a newer ADK on your system won't create any problems, but it won't benefit Reflect at all either.

For what it's worth, an upcoming release of Reflect V7 will add support for WinPE 10 1709 and will also support just using whatever WinRE build exists on your local system's Recovery partition so that most people won't have to download the ADK anymore at all.  I've successfully tested that in beta using WinRE 10 1803 and it works fine -- but that release isn't public yet.  Supporting WinPE 10 1803 (via the ADK) may take a bit longer since that just came out, but if you're running on a Windows 10 1803 system, you'll eventually be able to just tell Reflect to build from your local WinRE environment instead of having to bother with ADKs at all.

Thanks again.

Chris