CSMwrap - boot CSM on UEFI only systems.

[Dietmar]

Hi,

this XP SP3 on Arrow Lake board with pure UEFI, no CSM at all

can do nvme boot also. I test on Samsung 960 Evo 1 TB.

Boot is done always via normal NTLDR.

USB2 or USB3 boot it can do until now not, message "no boot device found".

But USB3 and USB2 ports all work on this XP.

Lan so Internet works via Realtek 8168 lan card

Dietmar

 

PS: Serial COM1 does not work and no PS/2, even there is a connector for it.

And low graphik color resolution 4bit.

Only graphik card that works is until now Radeon R5-240, with 1Gb or 2Gb ram, very fast boot.

Nvidia GT 730 and GTX 980 boot, but when XP starts after 2 min delay, I can hear the start sound from XP SP3 (Realtek),

but with those Nvidia cards complete black screen then after boot to full desktop.

Any tests with other PCI-e graphikcards are welcome.

Until now, the graphik uses the vgasave.sys. So, no graphikcard in Device Manager and so even no VBEMP ?

EDIT: I "succeed" to install the svga driver from Vbemp. No error. Then I set in registry start=4 to the vgasave driver.

The result is as with the Nvidia cards: Total black screen at the end of the boot process.

geekbench 2.4.3 reaches 35700 points, not bad. I think, this is the first result for XP SP3 and 245k cpu.

This is exact the score of my 12900k, also same geek 2.4.3 benchmark

Nov 25th, 2023 Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z690 UD DDR4Intel Core i9-12900K  318716 Windows 32-bit 35750

May 31st, 2025 ALASKA A_M_I_Intel                                           Core Ultra 5  245K  418514 Windows 32-bit   35750

Edited May 31 by Dietmar

[reboot12]

19 hours ago, Dietmar said:

Do you have a debug version of csmwrap.efi?

I have but the old version:

https://github.com/FlyGoat/CSMWrap/issues/14#issuecomment-2889051446

[Dietmar]

@reboot12

I wonder, what happens with graphik in csmwrap.efi.

On a compi, that has CSM but this is disabled and it boots in UEFI mode,

no problem with graphik at all. And the installed 3D driver works also.

On a compi without any CSM, pur UEFI, strange thins happen.

I read a little bit about vgasave.sys. This driver starts only, when nothing from an graphikcard is recogniced.

This is the reason, why the older Radeon AMD cards work.

The newer Nvidia, for example GT 730 or GTX 980 have also an integrated VGA Option Rom.

And in some kind, this Nvidia cards are recogniced from csmwrap.efi, but not correct and so the blck screen

and not the emergency solution with vgasave.sys.

Yesterday I installed the Vbemp driver svga. It installs at once.

But on reboot I get the black screen with the Radeon card, just because now this svga driver is recogniced

but not correct, but it is used, black screen

Dietmar

[reboot12]

21 hours ago, Dietmar said:

Serial COM1 does not work

For the serial port to work you need to load the pciserial.efi and terminal.efi drivers in the UEFI Shell:

load pciserial.efi terminal.efi

21 hours ago, Dietmar said:

Nvidia GT 730 and GTX 980 boot, but when XP starts after 2 min delay, I can hear the start sound from XP SP3 (Realtek),

Try my patched Longhorn 5472 winload.exe + bootmgr + BCD - the necessary files I seem to have already sent you. You need also fix BCD using bootice.exe https://msfn.org/board/topic/186793-csmwrap-boot-csm-on-uefi-only-systems/page/2/#findComment-1280116

 

[Dietmar]

@reboot12

Please send me all needed files, I will try,

also pciserial.efi and terminal.efi .

Most links do not work now,

thanks a lot

Dietmar

[reboot12]

@Dietmar

I sent to email.

[reboot12]

NTFS partition must be created using diskpart from Win7 or newer for bootmgr load

or change bootsector in WinPE:

bootsect /nt60 C:\

or change in Bootice:

@Dietmar Read also this: https://github.com/FlyGoat/CSMWrap/issues/46

Edited June 1 by reboot12

[reboot12]

On 5/31/2025 at 11:29 AM, Dietmar said:

Low screen resolution

What is the native resolution of the monitor connected to the graphics card?

I noticed interesting things when we change the GOP resolution before running CSMWrap. You can change the resolution, for example, using UefiSeven 1.31 in the UefiSeven.ini file and boot the u7 without the .original.efi file - then the u7 will boot at the set resolution and return to the UEFI Shell because it does not find the original.efi file
Now run CSMWrap runs at the same resolution as set by U7 (SeaBIOS probably also). I tested with winload.exe and in XP it boot in 800x600 but in the screen settings there are different resolutions to choose from - different depending on what resolution you set in U7.
Unfortunately, changing the resolution restarts the computer.

Edited June 6 by reboot12

[Tripredacus]

On 5/31/2025 at 4:33 AM, Dietmar said:

PS: @Tripredacus

You can make me very happy, when you allow mintsuki to create a membership here for his amazing work

https://github.com/mintsuki 

The forum has open registration, anyone can join. Just make sure they know about the forum rules, as you know sometimes these types of projects can be tricky to fully talk about here because of that. 

[reboot12]

On 5/31/2025 at 11:29 AM, Dietmar said:

Gigabyte B860 DS3H with 245k cpu and 32 Gb ram

With a PCIe Radeon R5 card you also have an XP desktop in 4-bit? How VBIOS is then used - check, for example, with SLIC ToolKit > C0000 memory dump. This is my radeon VBIOS when boot using CSMWrap:

Edited June 3 by reboot12

[Dietmar]

@reboot12 yes,because the Pci-bus,at which the graphik card sits,has no free resources.This depepends also on the >4 Gb problem Dietmar

 

[reboot12]

@Dietmar

You tried other cards? Best I use is AMD HD7450 with GOP+VBIOS or AMD HD6450 only VBIOS but I insert GOP to motherboard bios and now card works also in pure UEFI
https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=471154#p471154

With this cards works all - passthrough in VMware ESXi or virt-manager QEMU KVM, XP 64-bit in pure UEFI, XP 32-bit with CSMWrap

[Dietmar]

@reboot12

I have the AMD HD6450 and I will test today.

I also ordered via Ebay AMD HD7450

and soon I can tell more.

Until now it looks for me, that not the memory >4Gb is the problem,

but that on the Arrow Lake boards everything is connected to PCI-bus 0 (meaning only one PCI-bus at all).

But before, the PCI-e Graphik card was always connected to PCI-Bus 1, alone with its HD driver.

And Seabios follows this old path, but PCI-bus 1 just do not exist on the Arrow Lake board

Dietmar

Edited June 4 by Dietmar

[Dietmar]

@reboot12 

I make a funny discovery.

On old AMD Radeon cards you do not see anything on screen on the Gigabyte Arrow Lake board.This happens,because they dont know anything about UEFI.But this makes them ideal for testing.In the afternoon I make try with a Clover,that automatically loads the legacy Option Rom from this graphik card.As soon as I can SEE the menue from Clover,I know this means success 

Dietmar

[reboot12]

On 6/4/2025 at 8:11 AM, Dietmar said:

but that on the Arrow Lake boards everything is connected to PCI-bus 0 (meaning only one PCI-bus at all).

But before, the PCI-e Graphik card was always connected to PCI-Bus 1, alone with its HD driver.

And Seabios follows this old path, but PCI-bus 1 just do not exist on the Arrow Lake board

Try set VGA Enable in UEFI Shell before run CSMWrap:
https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=434759#p434759

Edited June 6 by reboot12