Original system had both Windows7 and Gentoo Linux (on separate hard drives). Windows booted the first time on the new system and I only needed to install a few device drivers from the manufacturer. Linux was a trip and went something like:
- attempt to boot Gentoo on the new system without any changes - kernel panic and couldn't find anything useful in Google
- boot non-UEFI Gentoo USB and chroot in to recompile kernel w/ the new device drivers (I needed to do it anyway)
- boot to non-UEFI Arch install on a separate disk - similar kernel panic
- verify hardware is good (played 3D games in Windows, memtest, inspect dmesg, ran other diagnostics)
- read about BIOS emulation on X99 being a problem for Linux, so decided to switch to UEFI boot (and I didn't have any other great ideas to pursue)
- since original install was one big partition on the disk -- split this into a 2M boot partition (for grub2), 128M UEFI boot partition (for my mobo), and the rest -- involved dd'ing the partition to a file, shrinking the internal ext4 filesystem, shrinking the partition-as-file, dd'ing back to the new smaller partition and finally expanding the filesystem to fill the new space.
- multiple failed attempts to get the motherboard to "see" the UEFI boot partition (I must have done something wrong??)
- motherboard options are either "legacy BIOS", or "Try UEFI first, then legacy BIOS", but there was new behavior (blank screen) so I figured was on the right track and it was using UEFI, but I had no way of knowing for sure.
- remember that secureboot is a thing, so disable it to get one step further into a new kernel panic -- now we are making progress!
- work through a couple of issues with the new kernel panic and other SSD incompatibilities (Samsung 800 series on Linux w/ NCQ is broken atm)
- move on with life!