A list of devices/machines known to NOT be able to legacy boot

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PHolder

Well-known member
Sep 16, 2020
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Ontario, Canada
The current status of getting FreeDOS booting (for ReadSpeed and SpinRite) is a bit of a mess. We're in a transition period, where as of 2021 Intel (as the leader of the UEFI consortium) has decreed that legacy BIOS and legacy booting must no longer be possible on new machines. There have been machines over the last couple of years who have been produced without the ability to legacy boot. (Mac's in particular, and recent Dell's.)

Because it's a bit of a mess with no way to know without a lot of work, we're going to try and maintain this thread as a place where people can report machines they definitely know are too modern to be able to boot legacy DOS. This will most certainly mean they have a UEFI and not a BIOS. To be most helpful to other users, you will need to provide identifiers they would be searching for, so motherboard model number or PC model number if it is from an OEM (Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, etc.) Please don't post machines you suspect don't work here until you after you've made an honest attempt to try to get it to work (disabled secure boot, enabled the CSM, enabled legacy booting, etc.)
 
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To add to @PHolder's excellent post, the implication of this is that many newer machines (which will be documented in this thread) that only boot via UEFI and not legacy boot, will not be able to run SpinRite or ReadSpeed until @Steve incorporates UEFI support into the applications (expected in SpinRite 7.0).

Microsoft Surface Books (1 - 3) do not support legacy boot.
 
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Dell Vostro 3681 desktop definitely does not boot any DOS. I unchecked Enable Secure Boot, still no DOS boot.
 
In the Dell Optiplex 70xx family, the breakpoint is between the -50 and -60 models. The Dell Optiplex 7050 supports legacy booting, but the 7060 is UEFI-only. (I have both.)

I haven't confirmed, but I would guess this is likely the case for the parallel, lower-spec Optiplex 30xx and 50xx model lines, as well (e.g., the Optiplex 5050 vs 5060 and later).
 
The current status of getting FreeDOS booting (for ReadSpeed and SpinRite) is a bit of a mess. We're in a transition period, where as of 2021 Intel (as the leader of the UEFI consortium) has decreed that legacy BIOS and legacy booting must no longer be possible on new machines. There have been machines over the last couple of years who have been produced without the ability to legacy boot. (Mac's in particular, and recent Dell's.)

Because it's a bit of a mess with no way to know without a lot of work, we're going to try and maintain this thread as a place where people can report machines they definitely know are too modern to be able to boot legacy DOS. This will most certainly mean they have a UEFI and not a BIOS. To be most helpful to other users, you will need to provide identifiers they would be searching for, so motherboard model number or PC model number if it is from an OEM (Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, etc.) Please don't post machines you suspect don't work here until you after you've made an honest attempt to try to get it to work (disabled secure boot, enabled the CSM, enabled legacy booting, etc.)
Possibly just worth noting that on some machines you can only enable legacy boot if you set a BIOS UEFI password. I presume you'd still see the legacy option, but greyed out, without the password but I can't be sure.
 
ASUS Dual Mode Laptop/Tablet Model: 7265NGW

I have been working on one of these for a family member, doing a clean install of Win 10 20H2 (therein is a tale).

After enabling CSM in the BIOS, I was unable to boot from my ReadSpeed USB stick. Seems like C: hard drive booting only.
 
DELL XPS 17 (9700)
I haven't spent hours on it but after 15mins or so I gave up trying.
 
MSI MPG Z590 GAMING CARBON WIFI

It's made recently enough that I should assume it belongs on this list (released this year actually), but poking around the BIOS, I saw help text that tells me the BIOS supports CSM, but the video bios needs to support it as well for it to be chosen. Seeing as it's a 10th/11th gen Intel CPU, there might be a chance to boot Spinrite if you have a old enough GPU. The most likely case is there's a base BIOS image used across all motherboards, and newer processors are just missing whatever the motherboard needs to handle video in CSM mode.