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Miscellaneous => Hardware & Software Corner => Topic started by: Gunther on October 12, 2012, 11:17:20 AM

Title: UEFI disks
Post by: Gunther on October 12, 2012, 11:17:20 AM
Here's a bit information for those which would like to buy a new machine. I've upgraded; my machine has now a 2TB disk. That sounds not bad, but the entire story is not so easy.

Making several partitions on the old MBR disks wasn't an easy task. One could have 4 primary partitions and 1 extended partition with several logical drives. So far, so good. But MBR disks are limited up to approximately 2.2 TB. My new disk is an UEFI disk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface) with a GUID Partition Table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table).

That means: the extended partition is gone; there are only primary partitions (up to 128) and you can manage disks with a size up to 8 ZB. That's impressive.

But here is the bad news: you can't install 32 bit versions of Windows, Linux or BSD. All attempts failed.

May be that could be interesting for other forum members.

Gunther
Title: Re: UEFI disks
Post by: hutch-- on October 12, 2012, 11:38:49 AM
I just read the article and the following line seems to be your problem.

> UEFI requires the firmware and operating system to be size-matched; i.e. a 64-bit UEFI implementation can only boot a 64-bit UEFI operating system.

Now I guess this means you can run 64 bit OS versions but not 32 bit OS versions.

I have just recently added two 2tb disks to my Core2 quad that were SATA3 interface even though the board only supports SATA2 but they still clock about 130 meg/sec so i am happy enough with them. The disks were WD Green 2tb models.
Title: Re: UEFI disks
Post by: Gunther on October 12, 2012, 11:43:58 AM
Steve,

Quote from: hutch-- on October 12, 2012, 11:38:49 AM
Now I guess this means you can run 64 bit OS versions but not 32 bit OS versions.

Exactly. Installing the 64 bit versions of Windows and Linux are not a big deal. I think that I'll run the 32 bit versions in appropriate VMs, probably Oracle's Virtual Box.

Gunther