4:45 suggested method by M$, in command prompt: reg query HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control /v PEFirmwareType (return code: 0x1 -> BIOS; if 0x2 -> UEFI). Another way is check output of bcdedit (Vista+) command... 9:44 in theory yes, MBR partition entries has relative sector and number of sectors so you can reach size ~4 TiB (512B sectors) but this is very risky and could cause data corruption by software with internal 32-bit calculations.
@@davybloggs1564 It doesn't matter if it's "Pro", "Home" or another edition because as registry value name suggests: "PEFirmwareType" is PE (Preinstalled Environment) specific thing. Before querying registry you must instruct WinPE to update his registry with this command: wpeutil UpdateBootInfo Under (installed) "W10Pro" you can check "BIOS mode" (UEFI or Legacy) in msinfo32; by checking bcdedit output; looking in Disk Management at partition types on your boot drive; etc.
@@MyszkaAgresorka so just to make things clear i can install os on drive larger than 4 tb as long as the partition is less than 2tb with mbr while with gpt i have no suc problem? Is gpt and mbr a feature of os or bios?
@@georgesmith3022 MBR is a feature of BIOS. (And UEFI in CSM mode.) GPT is a feature of UEFI. Both are features of the OS. For example, Windows 7 does not support UEFI, so if you have UEFI you have to use CSM mode.
@@georgesmith3022 You can do that but Windows 10 can't update an MBR installation anymore. I got the problem and had to change to GPT to be able to update to version 190x.
As someone who can't get my arch install working because of UEFI, and nobody wants to explain it, just give a command without any explanation, thank you. I've seen your videos occasionally, but this wins my subscription. Looking forward to more content!
4:53 - Windows Installer will be displayed in native resolution, with additional DPI scaling, where in Legacy Mode it's in low resolution, 4:3 stretched.
I've watched the rest of the video, and I do not agree with this. UEFI does not have anything to do with fancy screens, it is a method for starting up (much larger than 512 bytes) boot loaders from a (much larger) partition/slice on the disk.
The main difference between classic BIOS and UEFI is that regular BIOS can only read MBR partitioned drives. Regular BIOS also only reads the first sector (512bytes) and if it is not a boot sector it will try the next device. Now UEFI can read gpt fat32 formatted drives and can boot from ANY partition or folder on the drive (via UEFI console), although boot files are usually stored in EFI folder on the root of boot drive. UEFI reads a file with EFI extension.
Note, some laptops that have both legacy BIOS and UEFI, may have a problem with certain Media button controls if the system is forced into UEFI mode only. Dell laptops drove me crazy for weeks trying to figure out why the volume buttons would not work. Had to enable both Legacy BIOS and UEFI, even though it was on GPT and booting into UEFI, the media key's would not work unless both were enabled.
This is actually the very first time commenting on a video or any other web content for that matter. Since I'm currently trying to get a hold of the boot process (specifically the Linux boot process), I wanted to thank you for the great information and the way you laid it out with the accurate terminology for the subject.
Probably should of done it like this *BIOS* (Legacy or UEFI) >>> *Bootloader* (Legacy or UEFI) >>> *Installation Media* (Can ONLY install the TYPE of system it is BOOTED from)
What Chris has not made plain as day here is that Apples implementation of the Extensible Firmware Interface is actually contained on a small 100mb boot partition of the computer hard drive itself and is not contained in resident flashable ROM as is the scenario on a PC. A Mac has no directly addressable BIOS as such and merely a few TPM enabler chips on the mobo itself. Universal Extensible Firmware Interface is a hybrid of both traditional BIOS and EFI hence the 'Universal' moniker. Indeed to make Mac OS boot on generic intel hardware as in the case of an Hackintosh you need to create a bootable EFI partition installation with a piece of sofware called 'Chameleon bootloader' or 'Clover' to enable this pre boot environment that Mac OS requires. In practice it is a bit more complicated than this as older BIOS only mobos often require a special bespoke crafted DSDT file that enables the EFI instruction set to handshake with the legacy BIOS. If you ever intend to go down the hackintosh route check out the Tony Mac OSX86 Hardware Compatibility Lists (HCLs) and choose a more current UEFI model that is fully supported and you will save yourself a lot of grief and heartache this way. It is a truism to say that if your mobo supports UEFI out of the box it is more 'vanilla' and henceforth more hackintoshable by its very nature. Editing and compiling DSDT file translation tables is not for the technologically inept or faint of heart.
Can you explain this to me? I have mouse control in my BIOS (which should indicate UEFI), my C: drive is MBR, but when I load msinfo, my BIOS mode says "Legacy" I'm really confused about this. I don't know what I'm using. Since my PC is under a month old and the hardware is new (not old), shouldn't I be using GPT/UEFI?
@@harvester7578 That's my point, but not all Linux Distro with UEFI support, has a shim loader Just look at Arch and their derivatives, they support UEFI, but you must sign your own EFI bootloader or build your own shim loader
Just the clarity and accuracy I needed to succeed. Thanks! Tip in case useful: The only way I know of booting to Windows 10 on an NVMe M2 drive on a PCIe bus with a MB that doesn't supported booting to such a drive and bus is to: • Put Windows 10 iso on a USB memory key using Rufus (GPT / UEFI (non CSM) / FAT32). • Put the Clover bootloader files on a different USB memory key formatted with a single FAT32 partition. Make an NVMe driver available (there are web pages on how to do this - essentially copy the NVMe driver from the "off" folder to both the "BIOS" and "UEFI" folders, all in the "\EFI\CLOVER\drivers" folder structure). • Make the NVMe drive GPT from within an existing OS. I used "MiniTool Partition Wizard". • Boot to Clover. • Install a UEFI installation of Windows on that drive from Clover. I did this by dropping to the UEFI command line and running "efi\boot\bootx64.efi". I think you can instead copy that file (e.g. from within a booted OS) to \efi\microsoft\boot and rename it as bootmgfw.efi, and also rename cdboot.efi in that folder to cdboot.efi.bak
efibootmgr can indeed change the boot order. It can also add and remove boot loaders. Fastest startup time (and better security if you deal with signing the image in a password protected bios) is to directly use the linux kernel as your boot loader, skipping Grub or similar. Doing that involves setting up the boot entry via efibootmgr.
can you provide me those commands i am unable to convert from MBR to GPT It says following when i run mbr2gpt.exe command : MBR2GPT: Attempting to convert disk 0 MBR2GPT: Retrieving layout of disk MBR2GPT: Validating layout, disk sector size is: 512 bytes Disk layout validation failed for disk 0
For any UEFI-capable OS install media, the easiest way to make sure you're installing in UEFI mode is to get into the 'BIOS' boot menu and it will likely have 2 listings for the media...one w/ "UEFI: " or "(UEFI) " or similar at the beginning. Also, there were old legacy BIOSes (at least AMI BIOS) before UEFI was a thing that had mouse support to navigate the settings.
@@toasterthebrot if you need broadcom-wl to have wifi it's a problem. I have wifi when I install via bios, and I don't get it to work when I install via uefi
Unlike MBR, a GPT disk also lets you have greater than 4 primary partitions, in fact up to 128 primary partitions.. I think all TH-camrs neglet to mention this fundamental difference as well.
There is also difference in language used BIOS mainly coded in Assembly and UEFI coded in C++. UEFI is more optimized in code because it's newer and offers more security.
Thank you for the clarification and update. It is appreciated that you researched further to correct yourself because the smaller details matter in tech. :)
Awesome video! Once again you take a seemingly obvious and mundane topic and make it very interesting, while clarifying the confusion and misinformation espoused by other TH-camrs. Well done! But is it true that UEFI is limited to 9.44 billion terabytes of storage? The CRC32 support is nice, but the limited storage is a real deal breaker for me. I need trillions of terabytes! Also, you need to warn us if you’re going to be showing a clip from Linus Tech Tips. His voice is rather jarring after hearing your voice. I winced a little. Really glad you don’t do all the obnoxious TH-cam gimmicks like other tech channels do. Keep doing it the Chris Titus Tech way! Cheers!
@Appalling68 Oh no, don't steal my $0.50 cents of ad revenue! Lol, I don't care if they do, I needed to show how it is presented in other videos so folks understand that GPT is really what allows the 2TB+ drive partitions. Linus wasn't wrong per say, its just how it was presented made it seem like UEFI was the solution when GPT is.
@Mitchel Valentino LOL, funny you say this, as when I was editing I was like ahhh... I added a gain filter to decrease his volume by 50% so it made his clip quieter than the rest... HAHAHA.
I see in my BIOS I have 3 options: Legacy, UEFI with CSM and UEFI without CSM. It is set to Legacy. So you recommend UEFI over Legacy? What is the difference between UEFI with CSM and UEFI without CSM? Which one is the best?
Note that if you have an odd setup (most common probably on installs from 4 years ago or thereabouts), the efivars module might not be loaded automatically at boot (or might not be included in the kernel), even if you are running an EFI system. A more reliable method is right after boot to run `dmesg | grep -i efi` and look at the output. The first line will usually indicate both that it *is* efi and the EFI version and vendor in the case that it's an EFI system (usually will be "EFI v2.xx by American Megatrends" or similar).
I keep uefi on if i can on the computer. If it doesn't work or i haven't figured out how to use it, i go to BIOS/Legacy. For me, they're both good options but uefi runs a little better and closer to hardware
So you can do a legacy boot off a gpt partition? I thought the boot sector for legacy boot would interfere with the gpt partition scheme? I thought you needed a MBR disk to boot legacy?
Thanks for a good video on UEFI. Up to now, my impression on UEFI was, that it was a Microsoft feature to block other systems to be installed on that PC. My PCs are all old, so I only experienced the BIOS, however my Sandy-bridge i5 laptop from Dec 2011 supports the mouse too on its BIOS. Since I plan to build a Ryzen PC, I have a number of questions about UEFI: - What is the real advantage of UEFI vs legacy BIOS for the users, not for Microsoft? - Why is the UEFI boot faster? The disks are the same and that determines for 95% the boot speed. - UEFI seems to need a small boot partition and MBR also supports a boot partition, but by default it uses the unused first sectors of the disk. Is this the real issue, UEFI needs GPT for booting the system and the BIOS needs MBR? - On installing or formatting disks on old PCs, the installer/disk-utility always asks MBR or GPT, so I assume, that is completely independent from BIOS or UEFI? Except maybe for booting? - Why should the graphical interface be for UEFI mode or is it also supported for legacy BIOS mode? We need probably an additional video, that explains the differences in the underlying architectures. Up to know I used MBR and I use ZFS for data and as OS boot file system. I intend to move all 3 HDDs and the SSD to the new system and I expect that Ubuntu will detect the new processor (Phenom II -> Ryzen) and other changed hardware and boot without any change or re-installation. I will ensure that all disk have a copy of the MBR boot loader and I will keep the sequence of connection of the drives the same. Probably I'll stay on legacy BIOS and try to move to UEFI later, if it has any significant advantage.
TLDR is stick to Legacy it will treat you better. UEFI basically gives you fancy graphics on the bootloader, and I personally experienced about a 5-second decrease in boot time moving to UEFI. So past the fancy graphics and saving a couple seconds, that's really all you gain. Really not worth it unless you have to have the latest and greatest. Legacy can do some graphics, but not a full HD wallpaper with special icons for specific operating systems.
@@bertnijhof5413 Such as? Honestly curious why people are hating on using UEFI so much? It's perfectly fine, I think the feature everyone's hating on is SecureBoot, which the two are often conflated together, but are NOT related.
@@ChrisTitusTech Or, if you using mechanical Hard Drive and you tend to abuse it, such as moving it physically while your device is still accessing your harddrive (it usually happens when you are using laptop while walking) or you dropping your device, either intentionally or unintentionally Since i have 2 different PC, one is Legacy-MBR (Netbook), one is UEFI-GPT (a Low-End Notebook) I drop my netbook just once, and a few months later my harddrive goes unreadable, at all But my low end notebook, even though i drop it till god knows how much i drop it, it still working even though my display gone bleeding
Might be worth making another video talking about bios boot partitions and the bios_grub flag need to boot GPT formatted hard drives in legacy mode. The thing that I don't understand is how to use UEFI on raid 1, 6 etc systems so you can boot from any of the HDs
My grub always complains to me because I have my boot partition raided. HPUX used UEFI way back before 2006. When using software raid it raided the boot partition and you could set UEFI to boot one first and if it failed go to the next.
I've noticed some of my installs of W10 Pro have 3 partitions, some 4. The PC I'm using right now had an SSD with 3 partitions. It is a UEFI BIOS as reported in msinfo32.
I had issues installing grub when I was starting to learn more about linux. That is when I knew I had to check for UEFI boot. Any drive with windows installation normally shows up as two drives, one with UEFI label. It is the one with UEFI label to select while booting. Even if there is no UEFI shown or you select the non UEFI, windows automatically detects UEFI compatibility and switch to UEFI in a normal scenario. My laptop is new but is stuck with legacy BIOS (I don't know why, it's only released last year, curse you HP!). Well, I had no idea I had to run it on GPT and got errors. That is when I knew legacy supports large drives. Also, Linus was not that wrong, he was referring to MBR. GPT is a new way for legacy BIOS. P.S. You can get errors if you try to partition GPT drive in Windows. First, it will give you a warning if you partition during install. If you don't partition during install and does it later, you will soon get BSoD's and such problems. I don't know why this happens. This is the reason I can't run Linux with Windows in my laptop. Any Good Solutions? please reply.
I've always had issues when dual booting Windows on UEFI based Grub. The only way I've had success is to use Legacy when doing the Linux installation and the os-prob the windows install into it. Note: I do this with 2 different physical drives. Due to the way Windows now does it's bi-annual upgrades I highly recommend separate drives as it can overwrite the grub bootloader if it is on the same drive. If you want to modify the windows based bootmgr I recommend using EasyBCD (neosmart.net/EasyBCD/) Also, Milage will vary in Windows as it seems like it is constantly changing the way Windows 10 is setup. It is very hit and miss. I believe Windows 1803/1809 switched to favoring UEFI mode and why the setup fails when loading these images in Virtual Machines where 1709 doesn't have an issue. As far as Linus's video, I was disappointed in it, as he didn't mention GPT one time and made it seem like all you need is a UEFI based system, which of course isn't right.
@@ChrisTitusTech I had no issues with dual boot along Windows 10 on an MBR partition ever but on GPT it really is problematic. I am using two drives for windows and linux separate as you said in my old desktop and I used EasyBCD on a Friend's PC. Also, lately using UEFI was somehow causing problems using the new Radeon VII GPU. Somehow AMD forgot UEFI compatibility. There was some fix for this, I don't remember right now.
Weird that UEFI would cause issues with your GPU. I can't wait to try out that card, but good to know you tracked it down to that. I've had my Windows do some strange things with my GPT drive and at one point it was booting sometimes and other times not. I found that how Microsoft setup bootmgr relies on a very strict partitioning scheme. When I carved up part of my 6 TB with some Linux partitions it really didn't like it. I fixed this simply by booting from another drive that is setup on an MBR which Microsoft's bootmgr sees just fine.
@@motoryzen Maybe I was confused with partitions drives, sorry, it's been a long time since I DIY deeper into these things. I may be forgetting things here and there.
@@ChrisTitusTech Exactly! That partitioning scheme was my problem. Thanks for that workaround. I will set up to boot from an MBR disk instead. Also, I am not sure that GPU problem is so much of a issue, let me check weather it is specific to something or there is something else behind it.
2:57 Why not just look in the BIOS/UEFI settings and check if it is set in legacy or UEFI mode, then you can check it and change it w/o having to learn a Linux command that most people including me probably won't remember. In the BIOS You don't need to remember a special command to type.
Doesn't UEFI only run in 32/64bit mode instead of 16bit mode, breaking compatibility with older operating systems? MSDOS/WIN9x and more? Or are there workarounds for this?
Hi Chris, great info, I was asking this question on Big Daddy Linux Live a couple of days ago and they sent me your way, the reason I was asking is that I'm using PureOS and it doesn't have UEFI support and I really wanted to install it to my main system, it seems it's nothing to do with security, but mainly eye candy and disk size so I'm ok with that. One thing I've noticed is that when you call up your boot selection menu (F8 or F12 etc) in some cases it will name the usb (EFI USB and some name) or (USB and some name -- Legacy mode) thanks for the video!
A good video, but I would like to point out one minor detail. You hint in the video that a big disk using MBR has to be split up in partitions less than 2TB in size each. It's worse than that: you simply can not address sectors beyond 2TB, so you can only use the first 2TB of the disk.
Yes exactly! Another detail worth noting is that the bytes per sector also determines the limit, so if you have a hard drive with 4,096 bytes per sector rather than 512, you can technically have up to 16 TB on MBR, and would be able to go beyond the 2 TB limit in that case! MBR or GPT determines the number of addressable sectors, and that multiplied by the bytes per sector, will determine the actual limitation of addressable storage itself. That's why GPT's limitation is approximately 9.4 billion terabytes, but that's with 512 byte sectors. 4,096 byte sectors could be about eight times that theoretically! There's a lot of little intricacies to this.
So, we could say UEFI and Legacy are ONLY different ways of present the BIOS interface and capabilities for managing the BOOT, because it is controlled from the firmware only? With that being said, we also could add that it doesn't anything to do with size partitioning on disks, since MBR and GPT are different forms of how the files (sectors) are presented in the secondary memory.
Thanks for the video! I'm curious, we generally use MSI or ASUS motherboads and the same for Nvidia GPUs. What is common in the USA / UK / Europe / India and other parts of the world?
I am shopping for a laptop. I plan to remove the SSD, and put in a blank one and install Tumbleweed. My concern is the secure-boot thing that is on some laptops that allegedly causes headaches with a Linux installation. I am interested in the Coreboot / Skulls thing, but all that is way over my pay-grade.
whenever I try to change to uefi in my bios, I only get a beeping sound and my operating system doesn't load. Im using a gpt disk and my installer is on a partition in my second drive which is also gpt. I figure I need to make my installer boot into uefi but I have no idea how.
Thx ! I have never heard any Eggspurt explanation that made any sense to any normal nonenhanced Earthling ! I look forward to many more vids by you & will allocate funds to support your work ! You show me that many of my dollars were indeed wasted going to computer shops with techs that knew less than nothing when compared to either you or amateur me !
Chris, I just finished reinstalling using legacy boot and everything was under 2T, but I'm glad I watched your vid because I've never (so far built or partitioned anything over 2T) and I would have prolly been lost trying to command line in the BIOS lol
Howdy. Great. Funny observation. Most clips actually are about converting disk system from MBR to GPT. Not about Legacy and UEFI. Is there software that emulates UEFI ? My laptop is so old it only has Legacy BIOS. I would like to upgrade to Win 24H2 but the install rolls back at reboot. I believe the reason is the Legacy BIOS only. 23H2 installs on Legacy BIOS nicely though. Best Regards.
Thank you for this video but man, I'm still confused. I'm planning a new desktop build in a month or two. I will be using a Ryzen CPU along with an Asus x470 mobo, probably two SATA SSD's, one NVMe 1TB SSD, 1TB HDD, 32GB RAM, etc. I was planning on installing Linux Mint on my NVMe ssd as my primary OS, and then maybe Win10 on a separate ssd to be used only occasionally. I use a boot manager/partition manager from Terabyte Unlimited called BootItBM. Are you saying I cannot or should not install my OS's under Legacy mode BIOS? Do I HAVE to use UEFI?
Question: so, I know how to delete olde UEFI entries with efibootmgr. What I can't figure out is how to make say "Boot0003" be "Boot0000" or "Boot0001" now that I've deleted the old 0000 and 00001 entries. I don't necessarily need to rename my solo installation of Linux, just want to move it to be the lowest number. I know it is a bit nitpicky, but it bothers me that my boot options start at 0003. How do you do this?
@@ChrisTitusTech CoreBoot and LibreBoot are nice projects attempting to open source bios part of your PC. They are a must have for the "paranoid enough" people who don't want to be spied on by the NSA.
Many motherboards I've seen want CSM off though, except for one old motherboard which says to not turn it off unless running Windows 8 compatibility checks
now i know a fair bit about uefi(2) , ever since i bricked a samsung laptop , that had the duplicating efi entries "bug" every reboot. however there are a few things i never figured out. on my dell laptop i can export the keys currently in use but when trying to import them again after clearing them and selecting the file i just before exported , it fails due to invalid key format... i tried to sign the reFind bootloader with my own key , load my key with mok manager and all seems to work until a windows 10updater comes and i can redo the whole process,... (removing the microsoft key isnt an option because the refind loader wont be able to load the bootmgrfw.efi since its signed by microsoft... also if i want to use nvidia driver in combination with secureboot on linux the only way to have it go flawless is by using the shim.efi to load the linux kernel wich is also the one signed by microsoft. also in order to read basicly any fs other dan v/fat/16/32 you wil need efi drivers for that filesystem (most of them you can find in the chameleon bootloader zipfile ) , all of wich ofcource are for efi1.1 , and signed by , to change efi stuff from within windows(re) i reccommend searching for an old (free) version of easyUEFI, since the way to do it from cmd is hopless, certainly compared to the linux tools for the same purpose (efibootmgr and efivars). lastly , uefi , can be extended at your own desire , for my previous motherboard (msi z77a-gd65,) wich had no support for m.2nvme drives , (meaning you could use a pci-e card and it would work but you could not boot from it ) i used efitool and some other stuff following a german blogpost on the topic , and extracting the functionality from a bios update for a newer msi motherboard put it in the latest for mine, flashed it and voila was booting from it... (luckely the msi mobo had a dual bios so i kindof could see if it worked or not risk free)
Everyone in the world knows UEFI is used with GPT and BIOS/LEGACY with MBR. We all agree on that... where the destination is not made and where it gets confusing is ... Can you still use BIOS/LEGACY +MBR and Partition a larger than 2TB HD into 2TB multiple partitions with MBR and never have to deal with GPT? and Can all O/S's Support LEGACY BIOS +MBR as such?
Can I install Windows on one drive and Linux on second without grub, and just boot pressing f11 (on my motherboard) for boot menu? Can I do that with uefi and legacy?
Yes. You should be able to modify Microsoft's bootmgr using EasyBCD. There is some free version floating around but I just noticed they just started charging for it.
Thanks! excellent video :-) that GPT vs legacy HD partition *size* (as in - chop up a 6tb into 2tb partitions) was something i was wondering about (gpt clashes with my current backup strategy)
When I use UEFI in OS mode there will be no display when accessing the bios using a DP cable but when using HDMI cable, there will be a video output. And if I will use CSM I can access the bios using the DP cable. My boot option drive is set to UEFI. The gpu I use is gtx1050. Is it due to the gpu?
I followed your video titled "Minimal Windows 10 Install | ISO Creation, Setup, and Config ", and there was a part in there that states "you will need to disable secure boot"... I have watched some videos (including yours) on how to do this, but in my ASUS BIOS (Crosshair V Formula MB which I use UEFI mode, so I don't think it is too old), or am I missing something because I don't have a "Security" tab, nor in my "boot" tab do I see anything on Secure Boot. Now what I was going to try is, disabling Legacy USB (it has auto also) and Legacy USB 3 and then attempt to boot and install W. 10 from my USB 3 flash drive... And yes, My new SSD that I will be installing W. 10 on is set to GPT... We'll see... Any suggestions? Thanks Chris.
Hey Chris. I'm currently on a "Legacy" computer (Dell Precision T1700) and want to make my SSD with Windows boot on the newer "UEFI" computer (Dell Precision 3670) I already used Rufus to make a UEFI Windows iso USB thumbdrive...I think. I did this on the Precision as my Inspiron will not load windows. Do you know what my next step would be? Insert the USB on the newer computer, change BIOS to turn off all legacy and secure boot, and then F12 and try to start windows?? Im sorry if this is not the place to ask this.
Chris I have 1 huge problem with my laptop mecer z140c I want to boot with usb but its doesn't allow me to boot it. It doesn't show the usb what must I do please help me.
It still leaves me with questions - though you do say how to make sure you get UEFI at install time, is there any way (perhaps only after migrating all the drives to GPT) to migrate to UEFI from Legacy? (I'm running a Debian system)
Hi Chris ! You should have specified at the beginning what LARGE DRIVES exactly are. You only say it AFTER a guy from your clip selection says it - LARGER THAN 2.2 TB. Other than that, your clip is great. Thanks ! I bookmarked you AND liked+subscribed :).
Oops. I noticed I have installed me a legacy system. I think when I saw UEFI in the bios setup and didn't know what it is, I simply decided to live without it. Now should I really repartition my system drive and start over? Did I make a grave mistake?
Why do you want UEFI? For graphics and a few seconds shaved off your boot? I've done a live migration of Legacy to UEFI on an MBR drive. Here is the procedure to follow: gparted (make 300MB of space at the start of your MBR drive ) Apply *Note: This will take a LONG time and must be done from a live CD* cfdisk (make new ef00 partition (EFI) in the space of the drive and mark bootable then write changes ) format new partition mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sdxY mv /boot to /oldboot mkdir /boot mkdir /boot/efi mount new partition to /boot/efi install bootloader (remember in the video I said to do this you MUST boot from a UEFI enabled installation media) $ grub-install on success make sure to modify fstab so the new partition always mounts to /boot/efi reboot *BACKUP ALL DATA PRIOR TO ATTEMPTING THIS!*
@@ChrisTitusTech : That was my question: Should I switch to UEFI? If the answer is that the boot shaves a couple seconds only off the boot time and it looks prettier and nothing else, I won't do it. I'm not watching the screen during the boot, I almost always do something else, like load up my coffee pot or something like that. I guess there is no compelling reason to go to all that trouble for so little benefit. Thank you for your advise, though. I hope someone will benefit from it. Even the lazy bugger that's me finds interest in doing something new, once in a great while.
@@eznix , Yes. That seems to be the case. Maybe I'll use UEFI when I build my next computer. But that's not gonna happen very soon (x-ing fingers), my 10-ish years old gaming PC works pretty well still.
One thing that confused me (and so I ignored it) is that the BIOS on this newest motherboard has two icons for each possible boot device, one plain and one UEFI. (which you can drag and drop to any order, BTW.) So when I was adding another linux OS (I have a bunch) the setup gave me odd choices, only allowing EFI boot (which I have been successfully avoiding for years.) It turned out that the DVD booted different setups according to whether the BIOS was set to boot the EFI-version icon or the plain icon. Not every linux distro setup DVD does this, though.
Chris, thank you for the informative video. I would like to add that I have just recently installed Linux Mint with ZFS as the file system, and it has accepted a 4 TB HDD and is functioning very well with only legacy bios.
What happens if you install a new Linux distro on an SSD with GPT where there are a bunch of other drives that have been installed previously with BIOS and MBR?
Your explanation is very clear and straightforward. Thank you. BTW, The antivirus app has detected a UEFI issue, but the antivirus app can't remove the UEFI detected thing. What to do... Do you have any knowledge or recommended tools ?
1. I am a subscriber and I never saw that first UEFI video, so it looks like it wasn't properly presented by YT algorithm and that could be one of the reasons for its low visibility. The other question is why it happened. 2. What I hate about Legacy is that the boot data is saved in some vaguely defined, pre-partition, invisible and inaccessible space, while in UEFI we have EFI partition and it's clear where and what data is there - kinda helps to understand and control it. Also, because of EFI partition, we can have many grubs, on legacy, it's always one and the next one overwrites the previous one. Often there are issues with it, like the grub wasn't properly installed, or the previous boot sequence wasn't properly replaced and so on. What I dislike about UEFI is: it makes things little more complicated for newbies, because firmware vendors don't have a unified interface or ways of setting it. Because of that none of the dual-boot articles mentions even a world about it. So for example, when I was fresh, I had an issue making dual-boot, because my laptop showed some error prompt. The solution was to navigate with arrows to point the proper file in a proper directory in EFI partition to point it to the firmware FROM THAT ERROR SCREEN (not in UEFI settings, there was no way to set it there). Once it was done, the location was remembered and the next boots were successful. On another laptop Windows UEFI partition was used by default and that was all. I had to create a new boot in UEFI settings and point to proper boot files in order to work. I'm sure there are many other ways vendors do that. Also, the naming is confusing. Is it BIOS or UEFI? In my case, I am presented with typical BIOS interface and I can only use keyboard yet the laptop is rather new (3 years) and from top line (Alienware) so detecting UEFI vs. BIOS because of BIOS alike vs. advanced UI is not a good example. It's hard to explain for newbies and it's hard for me to understand how in someone else computer it is done. I will manage it fine when I see it, but helping others remotely is often impossible.
You claim to use the EFI partition in solving booting issues, how do you do this? The EFI partition is not a normal partition like FAT/FAT32/NTFS/EXT2/EXT3/EXT4, it is formatted with an unknown partition type. What software do you use to inspect the EFI partition contents?
Well.. i just recently learnt that to be able to boot with a brand new flashy NVMe PCie (4.0 soon..)... you DO need UEFI (and then GPT partition scheme/install).. legacy bios just don't know/recognize natively boot devices on PCIe (they can recognize NVMe boot drives in sata mode only though).. is that true ? if so, well.. that would be a major reason for me to try and test that new UEFI thingy right now then..on a brand new motherboard (x570 style , for the new NVMe pcies 4.0 later..)..formatting windows uefi/gpt on a classic ssd boot right now..just to prepare and make easier a quick clonage to a 4.0 boot nvme later..all in uefi/gpt for the future nvme (same os cloned).. that would be my main reason right now.. is that right?
my HP laptop the radio program is in dos so I need freedos on the usb stick but the hp does not see the usb it only sees UEFI SO I NEED TO FIND A WAY to put freedos and the radio software onto usb stick any help would be great thank you
yeah in my 2009 serer I had to toss in a couple of newer SAS controllers to support >2TB disks. It is BIOS only, and I can still read large GPT disks even after flashing the SAS Raid card into HBA mode.. So the disks appear naked to the OS, and still >2TB on ooollldd BIOS. My onboard SATA still only accepts
At the end of this video I still don't know what UEFI it self is? like why do I need to use it? Will I see a performance boost? Is it usually enabled by default? If I already have a working linux distro installed should I reinstall if I am not using UEFI even if it is working fine as far as I can tell?
What should you do if you didn't install in UEFI do we need to reinstall our OS again ? I am just asking because I have everything setup already and I just don't want to redo it if I don't absolutely have to.
You are correct that the maximum number that can be written in the partition size field is 2TB, but the start address is similarly limited. This means that MBR cannot support drives over 4 TB-1, and support for drives over 2 TB is not guaranteed (some old systems, especially 32 bit ones, don't expand the data structure size when reading the disk in memory, which can lead to undefined behavior if they try to write logical->physical address translations). Carving the disk into smaller partition sizes doesn't actually help with this limitation.
Hi, I installed Linux Lite 5.0 on my 10 year old dell studi 1555 (core 2 duo) and erased the windows 7 it came with.. now i thought of dual booting windows 10 with linux. I formatted my drive to NTFS using live linux boot and tried installing windows 10 ISO through bootable USB but on trying to boot from USB to install win 10 it gave me an *ERROR: Non-SYstem Disk or disk error. *. what should i do? I can boot into Linux live boot though but i need windows installed in dual boot
well which progam will confirm the status of GPT (W10) user.? I continue to have boot failure without any changes to the drive settings. Is it W10 or bios program related?
Great video and indeed a confusing subject but very well explained !. Whenever I have a new drive and want to use it then I use a live linux distro on a usb, go to the live session and run partition editor (gparted mostly) to enable GPT on it. MBR has a limit of 4 primary partitions and beyond that you have to configure the extended partition (that is the total size of the drive(s) after the primary partitions) and then devide, if needed, the extended partition(s) into logical volumes (up to 2TB each). GPT has a limitation, i think, of 128 partitions and does not have to be flagged as primary or extended or has a size constraint (well maybe in the very very extreme big sizes).
UEFI isn't really that confusing when you look deeper, but when you think of UEFI as a BIOS replacement, it screws with your mind, as you feel the MBR way of one bootloader in magical space is the way, and that UEFI is only for pretty graphics and 2+TB drives. This is unfortunately because of the Windows-focused PC world where we don't need to deal with multiboot anyways due to the fact that most of us just have Windows installed, so it's not something to mention since one wouldn't notice that unless they dual boot. To many it's just install Windows, and done. They don't realize that UEFI is a completely different beast from the primitive BIOS, like Coreboot. BIOS is in no way that similar to the UEFI and both are quite radically different from one another, it's just that UEFI does have a compatibility mode to boot like a BIOS and that many imported BIOS GUIs to UEFI instead of taking advantage of UEFI. As a result, you get Linux users going "fuck UEFI," when UEFI, like ACPI, is an awesome thing that had some trouble getting set up at first since Linux distros had to adjust to UEFI and make their installers support it and handle it automatically.
Aaarrrggghhh!!! I stumbled upon this vid today and wished I had it last week when I did my first UEFI install. I looked all over YT for a vid that would explain it and eventually figured out how to do it. This would have made it much simpler. Good job!
I have to take issue with one of your statements. Having mouse support does not mean it's EUFI. Back in the 90's and early 2000s there were lot's of BIOS that had mouse support, most notably those from Matsonic, ECS, PC-Chips, etc.
@@bigpod The term BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) was created by Gary Kildall and first appeared in the CP/M operating system in 1975. IBM did copyright there original IBM PC BIOS, but they don't have a trademark on the term BIOS, only the code contained within their version of BIOS.
I used microsofts "media creation tool" to create a usb thumb drive to install windows. the USB drive says its partition style is "MBR" does that mean when i install windows it wont be GPT and UEFI?
On so old computer is not possible to install Windows 11 as Legacy Boot but when I change it to UEFI boot, then it is possible to install Windows 11 without any problem. My question is, to Keep the boot as UEFI and use the computer as it is would it harm the computer and other programs work properly?
Note that 5 years ago, stock Grub for MBR couldn't read from GPT disks, and Grub for GPT couldn't read from MBR disks. Also, some old UEFI systems would not look for an EFI partition on MBR disks. (Legacy boot on GPT disks still worked, as the legacy boot method actually puts the boot loader at a fixed offset on the drive, ignoring the partition table itself). Anyway, that lead lots of us to assume it *must* be that way, and never check again. Recent UEFI systems and recent Grub handle it fine.
Thx for sharing. I find this all academic if you don't have a bootable system. No OS found is not something that supports Apt Get nor running any kind of anything. Have you got anything that tells how to troubleshoot a non-bootable system ? Again, thx for sharing.
I’m still not clear on something: if I have a windows 10 pc which is installed as UEFI, I can’t seem to boot from an MBR usb drive (a Hirens boot cd or something). The bios just doesn’t want to recognize the usb drive. Is that a limitation of the bios? Something enforced by windows? Or user error on my part?
so i have an hp7-1205 and it says im in legacy mode ... i need to switch to uefi for it to read my graphics card ! all the videos are so confusing can you make a simple one . ive tried the automatic way from hp support but says no drivers for my pc when i look it up... how do i do it manually
Good stuff. I got a question: Is it worthwhile to change from legacy BIOS and MBR to UEFI, without data loss? I think it can be done, the tutorial at ASA technical "How to Convert BIOS mode Legacy to UEFI of Installed Windows 10/8.1/7 (Advanced tutorial)" requires getting dirty with diskpart, shrinking the disk, using a utility called GPT fdisk (gdisk64.exe) found in Sourceforge. How did I get in this mess? Prior to installing Windows, and after having done some experiments with legacy BIOS, I forgot to change the BIOS settings back to UEFI, so now I got a Windows 10 on legacy BIOS and MBR. It's a 2015 Dell Inspiron 15 laptop.
This is my issue I am not installing Ubuntu MATE from windows. The system has no system and it does have UEFI. I have tried legacy installation and my hard drive didn't see it.
Just one question, the EFI partition that gets created, does it need to be formatted while doing a fresh install of the OS, or can be kept the way it is. I know its kind of late for this video, but would be really helpful to get a response.
Let me see if I understand this. I have an old Lenovo W510 laptop with a BIOS that is Supervisor locked. Still I installed Ubuntu 19.10 in one partition and 20.04 in yet another partition. It has no entries in the BIOS for UEFI. What I understand from your video, I could have installed Ubuntu and let the installation process build a gpt boot partition to boot from instead of the MBR. Is this correct? AND, would the Ubuntu install process create for me a graphical UEFI where I can make the changes that I would normally do with the legacy BIOS? Also, would this gpt / UEFI give me a "Safe Boot" switch?
Question for you CTT, I have a Thinkpad t530 uefi only bios locked laptop ( bought used that way ) and installed MX Linux 19.2 on it with a Rufus GPT usb installer. Worked fine all is good, now I want to add a Msata in the wwan slot with Linux Mint as a second OS, would I need to install ( efibootmgr ) you talked about in this video before or after to the existing OS Mx Linux before I try to install the Mint to the Msata drive, so the ufibootmgr will see and show the Mint OS ready to boot. Any reply would be appreciated. I have been using Linux/Ubuntu for a decade or more but always had Legacy boot mode to deal with, the uefi only is really new and tricky for me to deal with. Again any reply appreciated.
I still find it confusing and getting Linux installed on some of my "newer" machines has been difficult. They work but I'm not entirely sure I got them right.
Another benefit of uefi is that it supports installing 2 (or more I guess) bootloaders on one drive (If I am not wrong in LEGACY bios you can not do that; and also I am not sure if every uefi can do that but probably yes).
love the video .. you explained it well ... butt as a old guy i can tell you the reason alot of how to videos are different and some times wrong is because UEFI standers were never set 10 years ago .. man did some manufacturers make a mess out of it ... my 2007 lenovo k230 has uefi sport .. but it only works for USB / SD "removable" boot drives will not see an UEFI partition on a GPT disk but will see the UEFI partition if it was made on a MBR disk and will add the boot options to the F12 menue , but will not boot to an UEFI boot menu and hase no options to change legacy / Effie .. .. myself even on my kool laptop i have never frond a befit to UEFI ... i have only exasperated hardships with UEFI ... to the extra 5 sec boot time 1. the OS gets locked down, and for programs like GRUB or easyBCD "windows" it will take your ability to boot from a .iso, .img that are on your hard drives. so you cant use a live boot .iso to fix your system.. 2. if for some reason that uefi partition gets deleted , good luck booting or duel booting 'this got better over years' but its a horrible situation, if you encrypt any than 3. sincerity issues , the Ufi gives access to devices to change bios settings , if your concerned about that type of stuff 3. MBR is 100% fixable no madder what you do to it, and backwards sport for older or sensitized OS'es.. neosmart.net/wiki/easybcd/portable-entries/iso-images/ help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot
Especially glad to read about the additional 5s, thought I configured something wrong whenever I tried UEFI- and GPT-based installations. Again, the old KISS principle holds: I use compatibility mode, Grub2 and Ext4 on a MBR-formatted SSD to boot into KDE in about three or four seconds now (best time according to systemd-analyze: 1.347s, that’s without BIOS initialisation, but including starting KDM). Ok, not quite KISS. Maybe I'll give UEFI another try someday. [Edited to correct: meant to write legacy mode, wrote compatibility mode]
4:45 suggested method by M$, in command prompt: reg query HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control /v PEFirmwareType (return code: 0x1 -> BIOS; if 0x2 -> UEFI). Another way is check output of bcdedit (Vista+) command...
9:44 in theory yes, MBR partition entries has relative sector and number of sectors so you can reach size ~4 TiB (512B sectors) but this is very risky and could cause data corruption by software with internal 32-bit calculations.
Myszka - under W10Pro, that req query string doesn't work.
@@davybloggs1564 It doesn't matter if it's "Pro", "Home" or another edition because as registry value name suggests: "PEFirmwareType" is PE (Preinstalled Environment) specific thing. Before querying registry you must instruct WinPE to update his registry with this command: wpeutil UpdateBootInfo
Under (installed) "W10Pro" you can check "BIOS mode" (UEFI or Legacy) in msinfo32; by checking bcdedit output; looking in Disk Management at partition types on your boot drive; etc.
@@MyszkaAgresorka so just to make things clear i can install os on drive larger than 4 tb as long as the partition is less than 2tb with mbr while with gpt i have no suc problem? Is gpt and mbr a feature of os or bios?
@@georgesmith3022 MBR is a feature of BIOS. (And UEFI in CSM mode.) GPT is a feature of UEFI. Both are features of the OS. For example, Windows 7 does not support UEFI, so if you have UEFI you have to use CSM mode.
@@georgesmith3022 You can do that but Windows 10 can't update an MBR installation anymore. I got the problem and had to change to GPT to be able to update to version 190x.
As someone who can't get my arch install working because of UEFI, and nobody wants to explain it, just give a command without any explanation, thank you. I've seen your videos occasionally, but this wins my subscription. Looking forward to more content!
4:53 - Windows Installer will be displayed in native resolution, with additional DPI scaling, where in Legacy Mode it's in low resolution, 4:3 stretched.
I've watched the rest of the video, and I do not agree with this. UEFI does not have anything to do with fancy screens, it is a method for starting up (much larger than 512 bytes) boot loaders from a (much larger) partition/slice on the disk.
The main difference between classic BIOS and UEFI is that regular BIOS can only read MBR partitioned drives. Regular BIOS also only reads the first sector (512bytes) and if it is not a boot sector it will try the next device. Now UEFI can read gpt fat32 formatted drives and can boot from ANY partition or folder on the drive (via UEFI console), although boot files are usually stored in EFI folder on the root of boot drive. UEFI reads a file with EFI extension.
Note, some laptops that have both legacy BIOS and UEFI, may have a problem with certain Media button controls if the system is forced into UEFI mode only. Dell laptops drove me crazy for weeks trying to figure out why the volume buttons would not work. Had to enable both Legacy BIOS and UEFI, even though it was on GPT and booting into UEFI, the media key's would not work unless both were enabled.
This is actually the very first time commenting on a video or any other web content for that matter. Since I'm currently trying to get a hold of the boot process (specifically the Linux boot process), I wanted to thank you for the great information and the way you laid it out with the accurate terminology for the subject.
I'm still confused. This video needs diagrams.
Probably should of done it like this
*BIOS* (Legacy or UEFI) >>> *Bootloader* (Legacy or UEFI) >>> *Installation Media* (Can ONLY install the TYPE of system it is BOOTED from)
@@ChrisTitusTech With this in mind, I rewatched your video and it is much clearer now. I missed the distinction between the ROM and Bootloader.
Yup, it is very confusing and a very hard topic to cover. Glad that cleared it up for you.
What Chris has not made plain as day here is that Apples implementation of the Extensible Firmware Interface is actually contained on a small 100mb boot partition of the computer hard drive itself and is not contained in resident flashable ROM as is the scenario on a PC. A Mac has no directly addressable BIOS as such and merely a few TPM enabler chips on the mobo itself. Universal Extensible Firmware Interface is a hybrid of both traditional BIOS and EFI hence the 'Universal' moniker. Indeed to make Mac OS boot on generic intel hardware as in the case of an Hackintosh you need to create a bootable EFI partition installation with a piece of sofware called 'Chameleon bootloader' or 'Clover' to enable this pre boot environment that Mac OS requires. In practice it is a bit more complicated than this as older BIOS only mobos often require a special bespoke crafted DSDT file that enables the EFI instruction set to handshake with the legacy BIOS. If you ever intend to go down the hackintosh route check out the Tony Mac OSX86 Hardware Compatibility Lists (HCLs) and choose a more current UEFI model that is fully supported and you will save yourself a lot of grief and heartache this way. It is a truism to say that if your mobo supports UEFI out of the box it is more 'vanilla' and henceforth more hackintoshable by its very nature. Editing and compiling DSDT file translation tables is not for the technologically inept or faint of heart.
Can you explain this to me? I have mouse control in my BIOS (which should indicate UEFI), my C: drive is MBR, but when I load msinfo, my BIOS mode says "Legacy" I'm really confused about this. I don't know what I'm using. Since my PC is under a month old and the hardware is new (not old), shouldn't I be using GPT/UEFI?
Idea for a next video: what is secure boot, which OS-es support it? What is the relation to UEFI? What if you linux distribution does not support it?
Latest Linux distro use a shim bootloader
@@beezanteeum that's compatible with a secure boot enabled computer right
@@powerpc64
Yes,
Except: Arch or any of it's forks like Steam OS, Manjaro, Artix, etc.
@@beezanteeum Secure boot will only work in UEFI. It will not work with legacy uefi. So it will be a requirement for windows 11 I guess.
@@harvester7578
That's my point, but not all Linux Distro with UEFI support, has a shim loader
Just look at Arch and their derivatives, they support UEFI, but you must sign your own EFI bootloader or build your own shim loader
Just the clarity and accuracy I needed to succeed. Thanks!
Tip in case useful: The only way I know of booting to Windows 10 on an NVMe M2 drive on a PCIe bus with a MB that doesn't supported booting to such a drive and bus is to:
• Put Windows 10 iso on a USB memory key using Rufus (GPT / UEFI (non CSM) / FAT32).
• Put the Clover bootloader files on a different USB memory key formatted with a single FAT32 partition. Make an NVMe driver available (there are web pages on how to do this - essentially copy the NVMe driver from the "off" folder to both the "BIOS" and "UEFI" folders, all in the "\EFI\CLOVER\drivers" folder structure).
• Make the NVMe drive GPT from within an existing OS. I used "MiniTool Partition Wizard".
• Boot to Clover.
• Install a UEFI installation of Windows on that drive from Clover. I did this by dropping to the UEFI command line and running "efi\boot\bootx64.efi". I think you can instead copy that file (e.g. from within a booted OS) to \efi\microsoft\boot and rename it as bootmgfw.efi, and also rename cdboot.efi in that folder to cdboot.efi.bak
efibootmgr can indeed change the boot order. It can also add and remove boot loaders. Fastest startup time (and better security if you deal with signing the image in a password protected bios) is to directly use the linux kernel as your boot loader, skipping Grub or similar. Doing that involves setting up the boot entry via efibootmgr.
Thx. Helpful to know more about efibootmgr.
A years old Win10 installation can even be converted from legacy to UEFI with a couple of recovery console commands. Done that
can you provide me those commands i am unable to convert from MBR to GPT
It says following when i run mbr2gpt.exe command :
MBR2GPT: Attempting to convert disk 0
MBR2GPT: Retrieving layout of disk
MBR2GPT: Validating layout, disk sector size is: 512 bytes
Disk layout validation failed for disk 0
For any UEFI-capable OS install media, the easiest way to make sure you're installing in UEFI mode is to get into the 'BIOS' boot menu and it will likely have 2 listings for the media...one w/ "UEFI: " or "(UEFI) " or similar at the beginning. Also, there were old legacy BIOSes (at least AMI BIOS) before UEFI was a thing that had mouse support to navigate the settings.
this comment has ended my 1 and half day long headache. thank you.
@@toasterthebrotthe headach continues, when you don't get your wifi working in UEFI installation. In Bios installation everything works fine??
@@emanuelsanchez3762 idk, but i dont think it matters whether you boot the uefi or the bios version
@@toasterthebrot if you need broadcom-wl to have wifi it's a problem. I have wifi when I install via bios, and I don't get it to work when I install via uefi
Unlike MBR, a GPT disk also lets you have greater than 4 primary partitions, in fact up to 128 primary partitions.. I think all TH-camrs neglet to mention this fundamental difference as well.
Yes. This is the main difference I think and usually gets unnoticed (unless you hit with the problem itself as I did 😅)
There is also difference in language used BIOS mainly coded in Assembly and UEFI coded in C++. UEFI is more optimized in code because it's newer and offers more security.
Thank you for the clarification and update. It is appreciated that you researched further to correct yourself because the smaller details matter in tech. :)
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Awesome video! Once again you take a seemingly obvious and mundane topic and make it very interesting, while clarifying the confusion and misinformation espoused by other TH-camrs. Well done! But is it true that UEFI is limited to 9.44 billion terabytes of storage? The CRC32 support is nice, but the limited storage is a real deal breaker for me. I need trillions of terabytes! Also, you need to warn us if you’re going to be showing a clip from Linus Tech Tips. His voice is rather jarring after hearing your voice. I winced a little. Really glad you don’t do all the obnoxious TH-cam gimmicks like other tech channels do. Keep doing it the Chris Titus Tech way! Cheers!
Sure hope Linus Media Group doesn't issue a copyright strike against Chris for the use of 20s of video!
@Appalling68 Oh no, don't steal my $0.50 cents of ad revenue! Lol, I don't care if they do, I needed to show how it is presented in other videos so folks understand that GPT is really what allows the 2TB+ drive partitions. Linus wasn't wrong per say, its just how it was presented made it seem like UEFI was the solution when GPT is.
@Mitchel Valentino LOL, funny you say this, as when I was editing I was like ahhh... I added a gain filter to decrease his volume by 50% so it made his clip quieter than the rest... HAHAHA.
I see in my BIOS I have 3 options: Legacy, UEFI with CSM and UEFI without CSM. It is set to Legacy. So you recommend UEFI over Legacy? What is the difference between UEFI with CSM and UEFI without CSM? Which one is the best?
Note that if you have an odd setup (most common probably on installs from 4 years ago or thereabouts), the efivars module might not be loaded automatically at boot (or might not be included in the kernel), even if you are running an EFI system. A more reliable method is right after boot to run `dmesg | grep -i efi` and look at the output. The first line will usually indicate both that it *is* efi and the EFI version and vendor in the case that it's an EFI system (usually will be "EFI v2.xx by American Megatrends" or similar).
I keep uefi on if i can on the computer. If it doesn't work or i haven't figured out how to use it, i go to BIOS/Legacy.
For me, they're both good options but uefi runs a little better and closer to hardware
They're not both good options at all. CSM shouldn't be used. It's not secure and has less performance.
So you can do a legacy boot off a gpt partition? I thought the boot sector for legacy boot would interfere with the gpt partition scheme? I thought you needed a MBR disk to boot legacy?
In the legacy grub you could also use a background image right? Is the uefi capable of more fancy backgrounds?
Thanks for a good video on UEFI. Up to now, my impression on UEFI was, that it was a Microsoft feature to block other systems to be installed on that PC. My PCs are all old, so I only experienced the BIOS, however my Sandy-bridge i5 laptop from Dec 2011 supports the mouse too on its BIOS. Since I plan to build a Ryzen PC, I have a number of questions about UEFI:
- What is the real advantage of UEFI vs legacy BIOS for the users, not for Microsoft?
- Why is the UEFI boot faster? The disks are the same and that determines for 95% the boot speed.
- UEFI seems to need a small boot partition and MBR also supports a boot partition, but by default it uses the unused first sectors of the disk. Is this the real issue, UEFI needs GPT for booting the system and the BIOS needs MBR?
- On installing or formatting disks on old PCs, the installer/disk-utility always asks MBR or GPT, so I assume, that is completely independent from BIOS or UEFI? Except maybe for booting?
- Why should the graphical interface be for UEFI mode or is it also supported for legacy BIOS mode?
We need probably an additional video, that explains the differences in the underlying architectures.
Up to know I used MBR and I use ZFS for data and as OS boot file system. I intend to move all 3 HDDs and the SSD to the new system and I expect that Ubuntu will detect the new processor (Phenom II -> Ryzen) and other changed hardware and boot without any change or re-installation. I will ensure that all disk have a copy of the MBR boot loader and I will keep the sequence of connection of the drives the same. Probably I'll stay on legacy BIOS and try to move to UEFI later, if it has any significant advantage.
TLDR is stick to Legacy it will treat you better.
UEFI basically gives you fancy graphics on the bootloader, and I personally experienced about a 5-second decrease in boot time moving to UEFI.
So past the fancy graphics and saving a couple seconds, that's really all you gain. Really not worth it unless you have to have the latest and greatest. Legacy can do some graphics, but not a full HD wallpaper with special icons for specific operating systems.
One advantage of UEFI over bios is that like rebooting to safe mode from windows you can also reboot to UEFI. Without having to hammer F2 during POST.
@@FutureReverberations I don't have windows, so I have absolutely no advantages from UEFI, only disadvantages.
@@bertnijhof5413 Such as? Honestly curious why people are hating on using UEFI so much? It's perfectly fine, I think the feature everyone's hating on is SecureBoot, which the two are often conflated together, but are NOT related.
@@ChrisTitusTech
Or, if you using mechanical Hard Drive and you tend to abuse it, such as moving it physically while your device is still accessing your harddrive (it usually happens when you are using laptop while walking) or you dropping your device, either intentionally or unintentionally
Since i have 2 different PC, one is Legacy-MBR (Netbook), one is UEFI-GPT (a Low-End Notebook)
I drop my netbook just once, and a few months later my harddrive goes unreadable, at all
But my low end notebook, even though i drop it till god knows how much i drop it, it still working even though my display gone bleeding
Might be worth making another video talking about bios boot partitions and the bios_grub flag need to boot GPT formatted hard drives in legacy mode. The thing that I don't understand is how to use UEFI on raid 1, 6 etc systems so you can boot from any of the HDs
My grub always complains to me because I have my boot partition raided. HPUX used UEFI way back before 2006. When using software raid it raided the boot partition and you could set UEFI to boot one first and if it failed go to the next.
Would be interesting to hear more about using UEFI on Raid 1, 6 etc.
As for Windows 10 afaik, when creating the partitions for the system, you should see four of them for UEFI and two for Legacy BIOS.
I've noticed some of my installs of W10 Pro have 3 partitions, some 4. The PC I'm using right now had an SSD with 3 partitions. It is a UEFI BIOS as reported in msinfo32.
I had issues installing grub when I was starting to learn more about linux. That is when I knew I had to check for UEFI boot.
Any drive with windows installation normally shows up as two drives, one with UEFI label. It is the one with UEFI label to select while booting. Even if there is no UEFI shown or you select the non UEFI, windows automatically detects UEFI compatibility and switch to UEFI in a normal scenario.
My laptop is new but is stuck with legacy BIOS (I don't know why, it's only released last year, curse you HP!). Well, I had no idea I had to run it on GPT and got errors. That is when I knew legacy supports large drives.
Also, Linus was not that wrong, he was referring to MBR. GPT is a new way for legacy BIOS.
P.S. You can get errors if you try to partition GPT drive in Windows. First, it will give you a warning if you partition during install. If you don't partition during install and does it later, you will soon get BSoD's and such problems. I don't know why this happens. This is the reason I can't run Linux with Windows in my laptop. Any Good Solutions? please reply.
I've always had issues when dual booting Windows on UEFI based Grub. The only way I've had success is to use Legacy when doing the Linux installation and the os-prob the windows install into it. Note: I do this with 2 different physical drives.
Due to the way Windows now does it's bi-annual upgrades I highly recommend separate drives as it can overwrite the grub bootloader if it is on the same drive. If you want to modify the windows based bootmgr I recommend using EasyBCD (neosmart.net/EasyBCD/)
Also, Milage will vary in Windows as it seems like it is constantly changing the way Windows 10 is setup. It is very hit and miss. I believe Windows 1803/1809 switched to favoring UEFI mode and why the setup fails when loading these images in Virtual Machines where 1709 doesn't have an issue.
As far as Linus's video, I was disappointed in it, as he didn't mention GPT one time and made it seem like all you need is a UEFI based system, which of course isn't right.
@@ChrisTitusTech I had no issues with dual boot along Windows 10 on an MBR partition ever but on GPT it really is problematic. I am using two drives for windows and linux separate as you said in my old desktop and I used EasyBCD on a Friend's PC. Also, lately using UEFI was somehow causing problems using the new Radeon VII GPU. Somehow AMD forgot UEFI compatibility. There was some fix for this, I don't remember right now.
Weird that UEFI would cause issues with your GPU. I can't wait to try out that card, but good to know you tracked it down to that. I've had my Windows do some strange things with my GPT drive and at one point it was booting sometimes and other times not. I found that how Microsoft setup bootmgr relies on a very strict partitioning scheme. When I carved up part of my 6 TB with some Linux partitions it really didn't like it. I fixed this simply by booting from another drive that is setup on an MBR which Microsoft's bootmgr sees just fine.
@@motoryzen Maybe I was confused with partitions drives, sorry, it's been a long time since I DIY deeper into these things. I may be forgetting things here and there.
@@ChrisTitusTech Exactly! That partitioning scheme was my problem. Thanks for that workaround. I will set up to boot from an MBR disk instead. Also, I am not sure that GPU problem is so much of a issue, let me check weather it is specific to something or there is something else behind it.
2:57 Why not just look in the BIOS/UEFI settings and check if it is set in legacy or UEFI mode, then you can check it and change it w/o having to learn a Linux command that most people including me probably won't remember. In the BIOS You don't need to remember a special command to type.
can i ask you something i build a pc then i boot up my computer but i cant get out of my bios.
Doesn't UEFI only run in 32/64bit mode instead of 16bit mode, breaking compatibility with older operating systems? MSDOS/WIN9x and more? Or are there workarounds for this?
Hi Chris, great info, I was asking this question on Big Daddy Linux Live a couple of days ago and they sent me your way, the reason I was asking is that I'm using PureOS and it doesn't have UEFI support and I really wanted to install it to my main system, it seems it's nothing to do with security, but mainly eye candy and disk size so I'm ok with that. One thing I've noticed is that when you call up your boot selection menu (F8 or F12 etc) in some cases it will name the usb (EFI USB and some name) or (USB and some name -- Legacy mode) thanks for the video!
I have just one question: How in the heck do I uninstall UEFI from my computer and get back to BIOS?
Use a Core2Duo Motherboard
you can look in your bios settings under Boot if there is no lagacy support then Buy one that has...
That was a rhetorical question.. BTW.
A good video, but I would like to point out one minor detail. You hint in the video that a big disk using MBR has to be split up in partitions less than 2TB in size each. It's worse than that: you simply can not address sectors beyond 2TB, so you can only use the first 2TB of the disk.
Yes exactly! Another detail worth noting is that the bytes per sector also determines the limit, so if you have a hard drive with 4,096 bytes per sector rather than 512, you can technically have up to 16 TB on MBR, and would be able to go beyond the 2 TB limit in that case! MBR or GPT determines the number of addressable sectors, and that multiplied by the bytes per sector, will determine the actual limitation of addressable storage itself. That's why GPT's limitation is approximately 9.4 billion terabytes, but that's with 512 byte sectors. 4,096 byte sectors could be about eight times that theoretically! There's a lot of little intricacies to this.
4:06"...I believe I can actually change...." that does not strike confidence.
So, we could say UEFI and Legacy are ONLY different ways of present the BIOS interface and capabilities for managing the BOOT, because it is controlled from the firmware only? With that being said, we also could add that it doesn't anything to do with size partitioning on disks, since MBR and GPT are different forms of how the files (sectors) are presented in the secondary memory.
Thanks for the video!
I'm curious, we generally use MSI or ASUS motherboads and the same for Nvidia GPUs.
What is common in the USA / UK / Europe / India and other parts of the world?
I am shopping for a laptop. I plan to remove the SSD, and put in a blank one and install Tumbleweed. My concern is the secure-boot thing that is on some laptops that allegedly causes headaches with a Linux installation. I am interested in the Coreboot / Skulls thing, but all that is way over my pay-grade.
I had problems with uefi using linspire so I used volume groups to boot 4tb filesystem on mbr 6x 600gb 2x 146gb hdds
whenever I try to change to uefi in my bios, I only get a beeping sound and my operating system doesn't load. Im using a gpt disk and my installer is on a partition in my second drive which is also gpt. I figure I need to make my installer boot into uefi but I have no idea how.
Thx ! I have never heard any Eggspurt explanation that made any sense to any normal nonenhanced Earthling ! I look forward to many more vids by you & will allocate funds to support your work ! You show me that many of my dollars were indeed wasted going to computer shops with techs that knew less than nothing when compared to either you or amateur me !
Chris, I just finished reinstalling using legacy boot and everything was under 2T, but I'm glad I watched your vid because I've never (so far built or partitioned anything over 2T) and I would have prolly been lost trying to command line in the BIOS lol
Howdy. Great.
Funny observation. Most clips actually are about converting disk system from MBR to GPT. Not about Legacy and UEFI.
Is there software that emulates UEFI ? My laptop is so old it only has Legacy BIOS. I would like to upgrade to Win 24H2 but the install rolls back at reboot. I believe the reason is the Legacy BIOS only. 23H2 installs on Legacy BIOS nicely though.
Best Regards.
I make sure Secure Boot is enabled in the BIOS as it can't be in legacy mode if that is enabled.
UEFI has faster boot up time.
Noticeably fast or .01sec fast ?
Can a legacy(MBR) bios recognize SSD as drive for OS installation? Or we need to switch to UEFI for that?
Thank you for this video but man, I'm still confused. I'm planning a new desktop build in a month or two. I will be using a Ryzen CPU along with an Asus x470 mobo, probably two SATA SSD's, one NVMe 1TB SSD, 1TB HDD, 32GB RAM, etc. I was planning on installing Linux Mint on my NVMe ssd as my primary OS, and then maybe Win10 on a separate ssd to be used only occasionally. I use a boot manager/partition manager from Terabyte Unlimited called BootItBM.
Are you saying I cannot or should not install my OS's under Legacy mode BIOS? Do I HAVE to use UEFI?
Nope you can choose either, on newer PCs it really doesn't matter.
Question: so, I know how to delete olde UEFI entries with efibootmgr. What I can't figure out is how to make say "Boot0003" be "Boot0000" or "Boot0001" now that I've deleted the old 0000 and 00001 entries. I don't necessarily need to rename my solo installation of Linux, just want to move it to be the lowest number. I know it is a bit nitpicky, but it bothers me that my boot options start at 0003. How do you do this?
Hey Chris, how bout a video bout CoreBoot?
Thanks first I've seen this project, I'll have to check it out!
@@ChrisTitusTech CoreBoot and LibreBoot are nice projects attempting to open source bios part of your PC. They are a must have for the "paranoid enough" people who don't want to be spied on by the NSA.
GPT is part of the UEFI standard. But you can use MBR and GPT independently of UEFI and BIOS selection.
Is there a something about how to install Clover bootloader on a legacy only BIOS and use the UEFI emulation of Clover to boot to a GPT disk?
Many motherboards I've seen want CSM off though, except for one old motherboard which says to not turn it off unless running Windows 8 compatibility checks
now i know a fair bit about uefi(2) , ever since i bricked a samsung laptop , that had the duplicating efi entries "bug" every reboot. however there are a few things i never figured out. on my dell laptop i can export the keys currently in use but when trying to import them again after clearing them and selecting the file i just before exported , it fails due to invalid key format...
i tried to sign the reFind bootloader with my own key , load my key with mok manager and all seems to work until a windows 10updater comes and i can redo the whole process,... (removing the microsoft key isnt an option because the refind loader wont be able to load the bootmgrfw.efi since its signed by microsoft... also if i want to use nvidia driver in combination with secureboot on linux the only way to have it go flawless is by using the shim.efi to load the linux kernel wich is also the one signed by microsoft. also in order to read basicly any fs other dan v/fat/16/32 you wil need efi drivers for that filesystem (most of them you can find in the chameleon bootloader zipfile ) , all of wich ofcource are for efi1.1 , and signed by , to change efi stuff from within windows(re) i reccommend searching for an old (free) version of easyUEFI, since the way to do it from cmd is hopless, certainly compared to the linux tools for the same purpose (efibootmgr and efivars).
lastly , uefi , can be extended at your own desire , for my previous motherboard (msi z77a-gd65,) wich had no support for m.2nvme drives , (meaning you could use a pci-e card and it would work but you could not boot from it ) i used efitool and some other stuff following a german blogpost on the topic , and extracting the functionality from a bios update for a newer msi motherboard put it in the latest for mine, flashed it and voila was booting from it... (luckely the msi mobo had a dual bios so i kindof could see if it worked or not risk free)
Does HM65 motherboard support UEFI?
Some said yes while others said no.
I can't find uefi settings in BIOS
Everyone in the world knows UEFI is used with GPT and BIOS/LEGACY with MBR. We all agree on that... where the destination is not made and where it gets confusing is ... Can you still use BIOS/LEGACY +MBR and Partition a larger than 2TB HD into 2TB multiple partitions with MBR and never have to deal with GPT? and Can all O/S's Support LEGACY BIOS +MBR as such?
Why not use BIOS/LEGACY + GPT?
Can I install Windows on one drive and Linux on second without grub, and just boot pressing f11 (on my motherboard) for boot menu? Can I do that with uefi and legacy?
Yes. You should be able to modify Microsoft's bootmgr using EasyBCD. There is some free version floating around but I just noticed they just started charging for it.
You could but it's better to install grub and launch windows or linux from it.
Thanks! excellent video :-)
that GPT vs legacy HD partition *size* (as in - chop up a 6tb into 2tb partitions) was something i was wondering about (gpt clashes with my current backup strategy)
I use gpt in legacy bios mode
When I use UEFI in OS mode there will be no display when accessing the bios using a DP cable but when using HDMI cable, there will be a video output. And if I will use CSM I can access the bios using the DP cable. My boot option drive is set to UEFI. The gpu I use is gtx1050. Is it due to the gpu?
I followed your video titled "Minimal Windows 10 Install | ISO Creation, Setup, and Config
", and there was a part in there that states "you will need to disable secure boot"... I have watched some videos (including yours) on how to do this, but in my ASUS BIOS (Crosshair V Formula MB which I use UEFI mode, so I don't think it is too old), or am I missing something because I don't have a "Security" tab, nor in my "boot" tab do I see anything on Secure Boot. Now what I was going to try is, disabling Legacy USB (it has auto also) and Legacy USB 3 and then attempt to boot and install W. 10 from my USB 3 flash drive... And yes, My new SSD that I will be installing W. 10 on is set to GPT... We'll see... Any suggestions? Thanks Chris.
Hey Chris. I'm currently on a "Legacy" computer (Dell Precision T1700) and want to make my SSD with Windows boot on the newer "UEFI" computer (Dell Precision 3670) I already used Rufus to make a UEFI Windows iso USB thumbdrive...I think. I did this on the Precision as my Inspiron will not load windows. Do you know what my next step would be? Insert the USB on the newer computer, change BIOS to turn off all legacy and secure boot, and then F12 and try to start windows?? Im sorry if this is not the place to ask this.
Chris I have 1 huge problem with my laptop mecer z140c I want to boot with usb but its doesn't allow me to boot it. It doesn't show the usb what must I do please help me.
It still leaves me with questions - though you do say how to make sure you get UEFI at install time, is there any way (perhaps only after migrating all the drives to GPT) to migrate to UEFI from Legacy? (I'm running a Debian system)
Hi Chris ! You should have specified at the beginning what LARGE DRIVES exactly are. You only say it AFTER a guy from your clip selection says it - LARGER THAN 2.2 TB. Other than that, your clip is great. Thanks ! I bookmarked you AND liked+subscribed :).
What is the better performance for old PC ?
Oops. I noticed I have installed me a legacy system. I think when I saw UEFI in the bios setup and didn't know what it is, I simply decided to live without it.
Now should I really repartition my system drive and start over? Did I make a grave mistake?
Why do you want UEFI? For graphics and a few seconds shaved off your boot?
I've done a live migration of Legacy to UEFI on an MBR drive. Here is the procedure to follow:
gparted (make 300MB of space at the start of your MBR drive ) Apply *Note: This will take a LONG time and must be done from a live CD*
cfdisk (make new ef00 partition (EFI) in the space of the drive and mark bootable then write changes )
format new partition mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sdxY
mv /boot to /oldboot
mkdir /boot
mkdir /boot/efi
mount new partition to /boot/efi
install bootloader (remember in the video I said to do this you MUST boot from a UEFI enabled installation media) $ grub-install
on success make sure to modify fstab so the new partition always mounts to /boot/efi
reboot
*BACKUP ALL DATA PRIOR TO ATTEMPTING THIS!*
@@ChrisTitusTech : That was my question: Should I switch to UEFI? If the answer is that the boot shaves a couple seconds only off the boot time and it looks prettier and nothing else, I won't do it. I'm not watching the screen during the boot, I almost always do something else, like load up my coffee pot or something like that.
I guess there is no compelling reason to go to all that trouble for so little benefit.
Thank you for your advise, though. I hope someone will benefit from it. Even the lazy bugger that's me finds interest in doing something new, once in a great while.
@@OldieBugger There is no reason to use UEFI unless you want to. If your system is installed and working, it is fine the way it is.
@@eznix , Yes. That seems to be the case. Maybe I'll use UEFI when I build my next computer. But that's not gonna happen very soon (x-ing fingers), my 10-ish years old gaming PC works pretty well still.
@@OldieBugger I really wouldn't worry about it. You can switch if you need to reinstall in the future.
One thing that confused me (and so I ignored it) is that the BIOS on this newest motherboard has two icons for each possible boot device, one plain and one UEFI. (which you can drag and drop to any order, BTW.) So when I was adding another linux OS (I have a bunch) the setup gave me odd choices, only allowing EFI boot (which I have been successfully avoiding for years.) It turned out that the DVD booted different setups according to whether the BIOS was set to boot the EFI-version icon or the plain icon. Not every linux distro setup DVD does this, though.
Chris, thank you for the informative video. I would like to add that I have just recently installed Linux Mint with ZFS as the file system, and it has accepted a 4 TB HDD and is functioning very well with only legacy bios.
Which one is good..i have a laptop with Intel Pentium A1020 ..4GB ram..500gb hdd....
Which one is for me...uefi or legacy..?
What happens if you install a new Linux distro on an SSD with GPT where there are a bunch of other drives that have been installed previously with BIOS and MBR?
Your explanation is very clear and straightforward.
Thank you.
BTW, The antivirus app has detected a UEFI issue, but the antivirus app can't remove the UEFI detected thing. What to do... Do you have any knowledge or recommended tools ?
1. I am a subscriber and I never saw that first UEFI video, so it looks like it wasn't properly presented by YT algorithm and that could be one of the reasons for its low visibility. The other question is why it happened.
2. What I hate about Legacy is that the boot data is saved in some vaguely defined, pre-partition, invisible and inaccessible space, while in UEFI we have EFI partition and it's clear where and what data is there - kinda helps to understand and control it. Also, because of EFI partition, we can have many grubs, on legacy, it's always one and the next one overwrites the previous one. Often there are issues with it, like the grub wasn't properly installed, or the previous boot sequence wasn't properly replaced and so on.
What I dislike about UEFI is: it makes things little more complicated for newbies, because firmware vendors don't have a unified interface or ways of setting it. Because of that none of the dual-boot articles mentions even a world about it. So for example, when I was fresh, I had an issue making dual-boot, because my laptop showed some error prompt. The solution was to navigate with arrows to point the proper file in a proper directory in EFI partition to point it to the firmware FROM THAT ERROR SCREEN (not in UEFI settings, there was no way to set it there). Once it was done, the location was remembered and the next boots were successful.
On another laptop Windows UEFI partition was used by default and that was all. I had to create a new boot in UEFI settings and point to proper boot files in order to work. I'm sure there are many other ways vendors do that.
Also, the naming is confusing. Is it BIOS or UEFI? In my case, I am presented with typical BIOS interface and I can only use keyboard yet the laptop is rather new (3 years) and from top line (Alienware) so detecting UEFI vs. BIOS because of BIOS alike vs. advanced UI is not a good example.
It's hard to explain for newbies and it's hard for me to understand how in someone else computer it is done. I will manage it fine when I see it, but helping others remotely is often impossible.
You claim to use the EFI partition in solving booting issues, how do you do this? The EFI partition is not a normal partition like FAT/FAT32/NTFS/EXT2/EXT3/EXT4, it is formatted with an unknown partition type. What software do you use to inspect the EFI partition contents?
Well.. i just recently learnt that to be able to boot with a brand new flashy NVMe PCie (4.0 soon..)... you DO need UEFI (and then GPT partition scheme/install).. legacy bios just don't know/recognize natively boot devices on PCIe (they can recognize NVMe boot drives in sata mode only though).. is that true ? if so, well.. that would be a major reason for me to try and test that new UEFI thingy right now then..on a brand new motherboard (x570 style , for the new NVMe pcies 4.0 later..)..formatting windows uefi/gpt on a classic ssd boot right now..just to prepare and make easier a quick clonage to a 4.0 boot nvme later..all in uefi/gpt for the future nvme (same os cloned).. that would be my main reason right now.. is that right?
my HP laptop the radio program is in dos so I need freedos on the usb stick but the hp does not see the usb it only sees UEFI SO I NEED TO FIND A WAY to put freedos and the radio software onto usb stick any help would be great thank you
yeah in my 2009 serer I had to toss in a couple of newer SAS controllers to support >2TB disks. It is BIOS only, and I can still read large GPT disks even after flashing the SAS Raid card into HBA mode.. So the disks appear naked to the OS, and still >2TB on ooollldd BIOS. My onboard SATA still only accepts
At the end of this video I still don't know what UEFI it self is? like why do I need to use it? Will I see a performance boost? Is it usually enabled by default? If I already have a working linux distro installed should I reinstall if I am not using UEFI even if it is working fine as far as I can tell?
when using
sudo apt-get install efibootmgr
i get returned "EFI variables are not supported on this system." on kali 2020.3
What should you do if you didn't install in UEFI do we need to reinstall our OS again ? I am just asking because I have everything setup already and I just don't want to redo it if I don't absolutely have to.
You are correct that the maximum number that can be written in the partition size field is 2TB, but the start address is similarly limited. This means that MBR cannot support drives over 4 TB-1, and support for drives over 2 TB is not guaranteed (some old systems, especially 32 bit ones, don't expand the data structure size when reading the disk in memory, which can lead to undefined behavior if they try to write logical->physical address translations). Carving the disk into smaller partition sizes doesn't actually help with this limitation.
Hi, I installed Linux Lite 5.0 on my 10 year old dell studi 1555 (core 2 duo) and erased the windows 7 it came with.. now i thought of dual booting windows 10 with linux. I formatted my drive to NTFS using live linux boot and tried installing windows 10 ISO through bootable USB but on trying to boot from USB to install win 10 it gave me an *ERROR: Non-SYstem Disk or disk error. *. what should i do? I can boot into Linux live boot though but i need windows installed in dual boot
well which progam will confirm the status of GPT (W10) user.? I continue to have boot failure without any changes to the drive settings. Is it W10 or bios program related?
What is best for dualboot in one partition BIOS or UEFI ...I want to install Windows and Fedora distributions
So GPT+UEFI ..or MBR+BIOS .
Great video and indeed a confusing subject but very well explained !.
Whenever I have a new drive and want to use it then I use a live linux distro on a usb, go to the live session and run partition editor (gparted mostly) to enable GPT on it.
MBR has a limit of 4 primary partitions and beyond that you have to configure the extended partition (that is the total size of the drive(s) after the primary partitions) and then devide, if needed, the extended partition(s) into logical volumes (up to 2TB each).
GPT has a limitation, i think, of 128 partitions and does not have to be flagged as primary or extended or has a size constraint (well maybe in the very very extreme big sizes).
UEFI isn't really that confusing when you look deeper, but when you think of UEFI as a BIOS replacement, it screws with your mind, as you feel the MBR way of one bootloader in magical space is the way, and that UEFI is only for pretty graphics and 2+TB drives. This is unfortunately because of the Windows-focused PC world where we don't need to deal with multiboot anyways due to the fact that most of us just have Windows installed, so it's not something to mention since one wouldn't notice that unless they dual boot. To many it's just install Windows, and done. They don't realize that UEFI is a completely different beast from the primitive BIOS, like Coreboot. BIOS is in no way that similar to the UEFI and both are quite radically different from one another, it's just that UEFI does have a compatibility mode to boot like a BIOS and that many imported BIOS GUIs to UEFI instead of taking advantage of UEFI.
As a result, you get Linux users going "fuck UEFI," when UEFI, like ACPI, is an awesome thing that had some trouble getting set up at first since Linux distros had to adjust to UEFI and make their installers support it and handle it automatically.
Aaarrrggghhh!!! I stumbled upon this vid today and wished I had it last week when I did my first UEFI install. I looked all over YT for a vid that would explain it and eventually figured out how to do it. This would have made it much simpler. Good job!
I have to take issue with one of your statements. Having mouse support does not mean it's EUFI. Back in the 90's and early 2000s there were lot's of BIOS that had mouse support, most notably those from Matsonic, ECS, PC-Chips, etc.
Hehe great point I forgot about those BIOS features, but. That mouse was an ugly block 😂
@@ChrisTitusTech Ugly wasn't the word for it. Plus they tended to be way too laggy with the processors that were on those computers.
@@bigpod The term BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) was created by Gary Kildall and first appeared in the CP/M operating system in 1975. IBM did copyright there original IBM PC BIOS, but they don't have a trademark on the term BIOS, only the code contained within their version of BIOS.
I used microsofts "media creation tool" to create a usb thumb drive to install windows. the USB drive says its partition style is "MBR" does that mean when i install windows it wont be GPT and UEFI?
On so old computer is not possible to install Windows 11 as Legacy Boot but when I change it to UEFI boot, then it is possible to install Windows 11 without any problem.
My question is, to Keep the boot as UEFI and use the computer as it is would it harm the computer and other programs work properly?
Why is my SSD not available on UEFI boot option? But legacy + UEFI shows my SSD
Note that 5 years ago, stock Grub for MBR couldn't read from GPT disks, and Grub for GPT couldn't read from MBR disks. Also, some old UEFI systems would not look for an EFI partition on MBR disks. (Legacy boot on GPT disks still worked, as the legacy boot method actually puts the boot loader at a fixed offset on the drive, ignoring the partition table itself). Anyway, that lead lots of us to assume it *must* be that way, and never check again. Recent UEFI systems and recent Grub handle it fine.
Thx for sharing.
I find this all academic if you don't have a bootable system. No OS found is not something that supports Apt Get nor running any kind of anything.
Have you got anything that tells how to troubleshoot a non-bootable system ?
Again, thx for sharing.
I’m still not clear on something: if I have a windows 10 pc which is installed as UEFI, I can’t seem to boot from an MBR usb drive (a Hirens boot cd or something). The bios just doesn’t want to recognize the usb drive. Is that a limitation of the bios? Something enforced by windows? Or user error on my part?
so i have an hp7-1205 and it says im in legacy mode ... i need to switch to uefi for it to read my graphics card ! all the videos are so confusing can you make a simple one . ive tried the automatic way from hp support but says no drivers for my pc when i look it up... how do i do it manually
Good stuff. I got a question: Is it worthwhile to change from legacy BIOS and MBR to UEFI, without data loss? I think it can be done, the tutorial at ASA technical "How to Convert BIOS mode Legacy to UEFI of Installed Windows 10/8.1/7 (Advanced tutorial)" requires getting dirty with diskpart, shrinking the disk, using a utility called GPT fdisk (gdisk64.exe) found in Sourceforge.
How did I get in this mess? Prior to installing Windows, and after having done some experiments with legacy BIOS, I forgot to change the BIOS settings back to UEFI, so now I got a Windows 10 on legacy BIOS and MBR. It's a 2015 Dell Inspiron 15 laptop.
This is my issue I am not installing Ubuntu MATE from windows. The system has no system and it does have UEFI. I have tried legacy installation and my hard drive didn't see it.
Just one question, the EFI partition that gets created, does it need to be formatted while doing a fresh install of the OS, or can be kept the way it is. I know its kind of late for this video, but would be really helpful to get a response.
Let me see if I understand this. I have an old Lenovo W510 laptop with a BIOS that is Supervisor locked. Still I installed Ubuntu 19.10 in one partition and 20.04 in yet another partition. It has no entries in the BIOS for UEFI. What I understand from your video, I could have installed Ubuntu and let the installation process build a gpt boot partition to boot from instead of the MBR. Is this correct? AND, would the Ubuntu install process create for me a graphical UEFI where I can make the changes that I would normally do with the legacy BIOS?
Also, would this gpt / UEFI give me a "Safe Boot" switch?
How about secure boot? What does that mean?
Secure Boot is EFI ?
Question for you CTT, I have a Thinkpad t530 uefi only bios locked laptop ( bought used that way ) and installed MX Linux 19.2 on it with a Rufus GPT usb installer. Worked fine all is good, now I want to add a Msata in the wwan slot with Linux Mint as a second OS, would I need to install ( efibootmgr ) you talked about in this video before or after to the existing OS Mx Linux before I try to install the Mint to the Msata drive, so the ufibootmgr will see and show the Mint OS ready to boot. Any reply would be appreciated. I have been using Linux/Ubuntu for a decade or more but always had Legacy boot mode to deal with, the uefi only is really new and tricky for me to deal with. Again any reply appreciated.
I still find it confusing and getting Linux installed on some of my "newer" machines has been difficult. They work but I'm not entirely sure I got them right.
Another benefit of uefi is that it supports installing 2 (or more I guess) bootloaders on one drive (If I am not wrong in LEGACY bios you can not do that; and also I am not sure if every uefi can do that but probably yes).
Oh my - things have just gotten so complicated since when we used to boot from paper tape, haven't they?
Thank you for this great video!
love the video .. you explained it well ... butt as a old guy i can tell you the reason alot of how to videos are different and some times wrong is because UEFI standers were never set 10 years ago .. man did some manufacturers make a mess out of it ... my 2007 lenovo k230 has uefi sport .. but it only works for USB / SD "removable" boot drives will not see an UEFI partition on a GPT disk but will see the UEFI partition if it was made on a MBR disk and will add the boot options to the F12 menue , but will not boot to an UEFI boot menu and hase no options to change legacy / Effie .. .. myself even on my kool laptop i have never frond a befit to UEFI ... i have only exasperated hardships with UEFI ... to the extra 5 sec boot time
1. the OS gets locked down, and for programs like GRUB or easyBCD "windows" it will take your ability to boot from a .iso, .img that are on your hard drives. so you cant use a live boot .iso to fix your system..
2. if for some reason that uefi partition gets deleted , good luck booting or duel booting 'this got better over years' but its a horrible situation, if you encrypt any than
3. sincerity issues , the Ufi gives access to devices to change bios settings , if your concerned about that type of stuff
3. MBR is 100% fixable no madder what you do to it, and backwards sport for older or sensitized OS'es..
neosmart.net/wiki/easybcd/portable-entries/iso-images/
help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot
Very good points Thomas, thanks for the comment!
Especially glad to read about the additional 5s, thought I configured something wrong whenever I tried UEFI- and GPT-based installations. Again, the old KISS principle holds: I use compatibility mode, Grub2 and Ext4 on a MBR-formatted SSD to boot into KDE in about three or four seconds now (best time according to systemd-analyze: 1.347s, that’s without BIOS initialisation, but including starting KDM). Ok, not quite KISS. Maybe I'll give UEFI another try someday.
[Edited to correct: meant to write legacy mode, wrote compatibility mode]