All my PCs are older and I have been booting them in legacy mode. Until now, I have been using hard disks that are all <= 1 terabyte. I would like to move to larger disk drives that can hold more backups so that I will not have to do cleanup maintenance as much.

To move to disk drives > 1 terabyte, I understand that I must use UEFI booting mode. I'm curious --- do newer PCs run in UEFI mode only, or do they still support legacy mode?

Interestingly, when I tried a few searches on the internet for things like, "PCs with UEFI mode only", all the results were links to information on how to boot in legacy mode vs UEFI mode. This leads me to believe that new PCs still always support legacy boot mode, but that is only a guess.


Jim Anderson

Most computers still have legacy mode as a fallback, and some Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu) work with UEFI.

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I'm more of a proponent of not having system boot disks be large and instead have the data disk be large, as well as external.

I think that you do not need UEFI to have large data disks and that it only is needed if the boot disk is to be larger than 1 TB.

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Doing a little more research with something like "limit on access to larger hard drives with mbr" should bring a number of results with explanations similar to the link below. If you have larger hard drives over 1TB which you want to use for data storage, it should not make any difference. Also, my understanding is that the problem begins with 2TB+ drives. I believe almost all major manufacturers still give you the option to use UEFI or MBR. Less of a problem if you are not dual booting with a newer windows system.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/25...er-boot-record

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Pretty sure most modern computers could use Linux without uefi to drives over 2Tb. I forget the scsi limit but it's pretty high. If bios see's the drive, there is almost 100% chance you can use it in linux.
Some have also used a smaller boot drive and used larger drives for data.

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If you format a disk as MBR (legacy mode) you are limited to a maximum of 4 primary partitions.

Formatting as GPT allows you to use a reserved area of the GPT for a MBR boot (with its restrictions); as a UEFI GPT you get lots of primary partitions and no 2.2TB limit.
If you are also using Windows, you are probably forced to use MBR?

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There are a few misconceptions here, mostly related to the distinction between GPT and UEFI.

If you want to address disks over 2TiB (and your disk isn't Advanced Format that can present native logical sectors of 4096 bytes), you will need GPT partitioning. You do *not* need to have UEFI firmware to support GPT, it works fine with BIOS (termed a "BIOS/GPT boot"). Naturally, both the boot loader and the operating system will need to be GPT-aware.

It should be noted that some buggy BIOSes have problems booting from GPT disks, but you would be unlucky if that affected you.

For more info on MBR vs GPT:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-vs-gpt-37329/

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MBR (legacy) mode fully supports all HDs marketed as 2TB. I don't think any other sizes above 2TB are available before 2.5TB, which MBR does not fully support, and does require use of GPT instead. IOW, your older PCs don't necessarily need GPT for you to use larger HDs in them, and neither would UEFI be required, or even an option, depending on the firmware (BIOS) those "older" PCs use.

MBR can be used with a HD larger than 2TB, but not with expectation of unlimited access to the entire HD. The excess capacity above 2TB would simply be wasted unless and until repartitioned with GPT. I use "expectation" because with careful expert partition configuration of more than one partition, more than 2TB can within limits be accessible via MBR partitioning.

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