Does anyone know in GIGABYTE BIOS under “BIOS Features” when to change “Windows 8 Features” from “Other OS” to “Windows 8” or “Windows 8 WHQL” and why?
It concerns modes that have several decreased boot times and options such as, ex. Fast Boot and Secure Boot, enabling CSM/Legacy On/Off, Pure UEFI environment/boot On/Off, full screen logo boot etc…
EDIT: When is, the user’s choice and how we wants his system environment and OS configuration and by the way, Google is your “friend” as well several GigaByte mb manuals/models around, from the same generation of hw off course, not recent bios/models.
Yes, but when to change “Windows 8 Features” from “Other OS” to “Windows 8” or “Windows 8 WHQL” and for why?
Could be driver-related things that affect the way some PCIe devices work in the motherboard (specifically PCIe root ports and bridges) and whether they use drivers tested by WHQL or not.
Or some other type of device but it’s still very probable that it is just driver-related.
IIRC
Other OS = Secure Boot settings disabled in UEFI for non-UEFI OS such as Windows 7
Windows 8 = Secure Boot settings appear in UEFI for Windows 8
Windows 8 WHQL = Secure Boot settings available and WHQL driver signing will be strictly enforced through the boot process. Any devices that have older WHQL drivers will fail to function.
Microsoft updated the WHQL certificates so that vendors needed to use the appropriate Hardware Certification Kit (HCK) to sign drivers for Windows 8.
Certificate cross-signing was no longer accepted for driver signing:
Cross-Certificates Overview
A cross-certificate is a digital certificate issued by one Certificate Authority (CA) that establishes a trust relationship with another CA by allowing the public key of the other CA’s root certificate to be trusted. This process is known as cross-signing, where the CA’s certificate is signed by another CA to create multiple valid trust paths.
Vendors could use the “Windows 8 WHQL” setting to test that their newly signed drivers actually worked, as evidenced by this support email message from Gigabyte:
Thank you for emailing GIGABYTE.
We are delighted with your interest in our products.
The “Windows 8 WHQL” Setting is only for Systemintegrators to run a full Microsoft WHQL test.
Please don´t use this for normal operation.
Kind regards
GIGABYTE-Team Germany
1 Like
For Windows 10 and Windows 11 should “Other OS” or “Windows 8” be selected? And if either of the two is used, which of other options that become available, should be enabled or disabled?
@kyriacos This is a good question.
For Windows 10, where secure boot isn’t a mandatory installation requirement I would use “Other OS” to avoid WHQL certificate issues that could occur with older drivers. IIRC some people had issues with USB drivers not working when updating from Windows 8 to Windows 10.
You should also check whether CSM is enabled or disabled before you install Windows 10 and if disabling CSM, ensure all devices have UEFI capable drivers, especially the discrete graphics card.
For Windows 11, where secure is mandatory, select “Windows 8”, load the default secure boot keys and enable secure boot. Then test by attempting to clean install Windows 11. Recent builds (22H2, 23H2, 24H2) have the strictest requirements.
Microsoft has revoked vulnerable secure boot keys over the years which has forced some vendors to release new BIOS with updated keys.
For your Z97 motherboard Windows 11 may work with the default vendor secure boot keys, if not you could try adding your own custom secure boot keys if your BIOS has the “custom” option.
I always had “Other OS” selected and I never faced a problem installing Windows. Has “Windows 8 Features” anything to do with the 2TB limit?
1 Like
“Windows 8 Features” sounds like a marketing term but it possibly could refer to being able to boot from a drive 2TB or larger (using GPT) among other things.