Technical white paper UEFI Secure Boot on HP business notebooks, desktops, and workstations

UEFI pre-boot 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 Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI ) is the computer industry’s solution to BIOS limitations. UEFI is a set of modular interfaces that replaces the set of traditional BIOS interfaces between the OS and platform firmware.

UEFI is derived from high-level C language and is driver-based, scalable, and easy to debug and upgrade. UEFI uses a modular, platform-independent architecture that can perform boot and other BIOS functions. HP employs this technology to implement an UEFI partition on all of its business notebook and desktop computers.1 Along with replacing the traditional BIOS interface, the HP UEFI partition adds tools to the pre-boot system environment.

The HP UEFI partition is viewable on the hard drive, labeled as HP_TOOLS. Starting with 2008, HP business notebook and desktop platforms that included the UEFI BIOS, HP created the UEFI partition as a FAT32 primary partition, due to UEFI limitations with accessing other partition formats. These guidelines include specifications for the Microsoft® Windows® 8 operating system (OS).

All mention of notebooks, desktops, and workstations in this document refer to HP business products only. For more information about UEFI, go to http://www.hp.com/go/techcenter.

Supported models

Table 1 shows the HP business notebooks, desktop computers, and workstations that support UEFI Pre-boot Guidelines and Windows 8 UEFI Secure Boot. Unless otherwise indicated, the information in this document applies to the notebooks, desktops, and workstations listed in Table 1. Differences in UEFI pre-boot or Secure Boot implementation between HP business products are noted where appropriate.

Table 1. HP business PCs supporting UEFI pre-boot guidelines and Windows 8 UEFI Secure Boot.

HP business notebooksHP business desktopsHP workstations

 

 

 

HP Elitebook p seriesHP Compaq 8300 Elite seriesEliteBook 8570w, 8770w

 

 

 

HP ProBook b/m/s seriesHP Compaq 6300 and 6305 Pro seriesWorkstations Z1, Z220 (CMT/SFF), Z420, Z620, Z820

 

 

 

HP_TOOLS for HP UEFI and pre-boot applications

Partitions and directory paths for pre-boot deliverables have changed in Windows 8. Table 2 shows the Windows 8 changes.

Table 2. Pre-boot deliverables with partition and directory paths for Windows 8 on GPT-formatted notebooks and desktops/workstations

ComponentPartition name and path

Partition name and path

 

on GPT-formatted notebook HDDon GPT-formatted desktop/workstation HDD

 

 

 

BIOS images[ESP] /UEFI/HP/BIOS [/New, /Current,ESP] /UEFI/HP/BIOS [/New, /Current, /Previous]

 

/Previous]

 

 

 

 

UEFI BIOS Update[ESP] /UEFI/HP/ BiosUpdaten/a

 

 

 

System Diagnostics[ESP] /UEFI/HP/SystemDiags

[ESP] /UEFI/HP/SystemDiags

 

 

 

Language[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-PACKARD /Language

n/a

 

 

 

Custom Logo[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-PACKARD/Logo

n/a

 

 

 

SpareKey Language[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-PACKARD/SpareKey

n/a

 

 

 

SecureHV[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-PACKARD/SecureHV

[HP_TOOLS] /HEWLETT-PACKARD/SecureHV

 

 

 

1Except for the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC.

3