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A profile of Song-Chun Zhu, an AI scientist and NSF and Pentagon grantee, who left the US after 28 years to lead China's state-backed AI institute BIGAI in 2020 (Chang Che/The Guardian)

Chang Che / The Guardian : A profile of Song-Chun Zhu, an AI scientist and NSF and Pentagon grantee, who left the US after 28 years to le...

31 March 2023

Detect whether Windows PE is booted in BIOS or UEFI mode

Check the HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\PEFirmwareType registry value to see if the PC is booted to UEFI or BIOS mode. Note: you may need to run wpeutil UpdateBootInfo to make sure this value is present.


reg query HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control /v PEFirmwareType

This command returns 0x1 if the PC is booted into BIOS mode, or 0x2 if the PC is booted in UEFI mode.


wpeutil UpdateBootInfo
for /f "tokens=2* delims=  " %%A in ('reg query HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control /v PEFirmwareType') DO SET Firmware=%%B
:: Note: delims is a TAB followed by a space.
if %Firmware%==0x1 echo The PC is booted in BIOS mode.
if %Firmware%==0x2 echo The PC is booted in UEFI mode.