UEFI disks

[Gunther]

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 with a 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

[hutch--]

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.

[Gunther]

Steve,

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