Installing Windows 8.1 on a Toshiba Tecra Z50 with Secure Boot and uEFI

There seems to be a bit of a caveat installing Windows 8.1 onto a Tecra Z50 when Secure Boot and uEFI are enabled.

We cannot use an enclosure that mounts an ISO and presents it as a bootable optical drive or a USB flash drive formatted with NTFS. Whatever method we tried we ended up with various errors that lead nowhere.

Once we formatted a 4GB stick with FAT32, set it to active, and copied the Windows 8.1 content over to the flash drive we were able to install the OS as expected.

Thanks to Chris G. of Toshiba Canada for helping us to work through getting a new Tecra Z50-A set up.

Oh, and for now we need to get the required drivers from the Toshiba US site as the Canadian site is not hosting any yet.

Philip Elder
Microsoft Cluster MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

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