"Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

[artdrivers]

I found this article interesting.
Unified EFI Forum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
UEFI - Home
UEFI - About UEFI

[artdrivers]

Re: "Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

Goodbye OC as I know it also.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this subject?

[Acebmxer]

Re: "Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

I read it before somewhere they said gigabyte is not switching over to Efi. I was only interested in it when I was trying to install mac os. but I got that working with out efi.

[Psycho101]

Re: "Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

EFI may or may not catch on. I'm betting it won't. This was tried years ago. Have a search for "WinBIOS", this was a similar "better looking" BIOS GUI that disappeared soon after being used for the first time.

IMO a fancy BIOS interface is pointless as well as being just another over complicated additional layer thus adding more things that can potentially go wrong.

It's inevitable that eventually the BIOS as we know it will change, but when is anyone's guess. Gigabyte at the moment have quite rightly decided to spend their R&D cash on something that will make a difference to every day users rather then tart up a BIOS interface that 90% of their customers will probably never ever bother accessing. I don't know any regular non over clockers that have even been into their BIOS and most of those don't even know what a BIOS is.

[cylix]

Re: "Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

EFI taking hold is really dependent on elements outside of the consumer world. At this time, I still have yet to see a huge penetration of EFI boards in any large scale data center.

However, it's a new year and technology is evolving.

Likely we will see further adoption as legacy technology is phased out.

Hopefully the royalties are so awful that it will ruin any chance of wide spread adoption.

[mv2devnull]

Re: "Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

DOS MBR partition table has its 2 TB limit. Once there starts to be over 2 TB disks with over 2 TB partitions that people want to boot from, then something new will be asked for, and GPT offered by EFI is one such gizmo.

I'm not holding my breath.

[artdrivers]

Re: "Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

DOS MBR partition table has its 2 TB limit. Once there starts to be over 2 TB disks with over 2 TB partitions that people want to boot from, then something new will be asked for, and GPT offered by EFI is one such gizmo.

I guess Gigabyte and those who refuse to switch over to UEFI will need to find another source for large TB single partitioned hard-drives. That or we will find the motherboard manufacturers that do support larger than 2 terabytes on a single partition.

[Psycho101]

Re: "Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

I'm not sure if I'm talking about the same thing, but when testing my secondSSD before making a RAID array, I was offered the choice in Diak Management of making my drive either a "Standard MBR" drive or using GPT. It recommended GPT if I were creating a partition over 2TB. This would imply that GPT isn't needed to be supported by the BIOS/EFI BIOS. After all, I believe this kind of thing is Disk structure related as it's to do with partitions. It doesn't have anything to do with LBA or any other way to detect a HDD to a BIOS's needs. OFC, the BIOS or AHCI BIOS must be able to read the structure and layout of the disk for a successful hand off to the OS for booting, but as long as it knows where to start from things should be fine.

I'm also sure that the more traditional BIOS can be reworked to support this if it is indeed necessary. so called "large disk" support (using quotes because this is no longer considered large) has been added at several points in both BIOS and in OS's with changes to partitioning tools, most vivid for me being the changes to fdisk in Windows 95 OSR2 (Official Service Release two) to allow larger partitions. This had to be instigated before creating any partitions.

I also vaguely remember there beng a 136GB limit to do with the BIO a while ao, which was swiftly hacked around.

If it brings features for people that are useful, even if I personally don't benefit from them, then I will advocate EFI, for sure. However if it's just going to be visual fluff, I see no point tarting up a BIOS GUI. It's kind of like knowing that the PC Windows interface is slick and works well, then going out and buying a second hand Amstrad "Green Screen" Word processor and marvelling over its interface (they look naff btw, had one in the very early 90's... most Amstrad stuff is junkapart from when they bought Sinclair.. Spectrum rules!!). The interface of EFI is certainly 1000% nicer than the current crop of BIOS screens, but compared to Windows, Linux (Love the lookof Linux/unix based OS's) and OSX, it is still ugly. I don't spend enough time in the BIOS to warrant the bling. Admittedly for the first 1-2 weeks of a new machines existance I'm OCing and seeing the BIOS a lot, but after that I probably see the BIOS screen once every 2 months when I change SATA port modes to clean my SSD's.

I am glad weare having an inteligent discussion about this though, From the searches for info I have done for EFI there are a lot of arguements on forums. Shame. At least we're sensible here.

[mv2devnull]

Re: "Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

I'm not sure if I'm talking about the same thing, but when testing my secondSSD before making a RAID array, I was offered the choice in Diak Management of making my drive either a "Standard MBR" drive or using GPT. It recommended GPT if I were creating a partition over 2TB. This would imply that GPT isn't needed to be supported by the BIOS/EFI BIOS. After all, I believe this kind of thing is Disk structure related as it's to do with partitions. It doesn't have anything to do with LBA or any other way to detect a HDD to a BIOS's needs. OFC, the BIOS or AHCI BIOS must be able to read the structure and layout of the disk for a successful hand off to the OS for booting, but as long as it knows where to start from things should be fine.

Yes and yes. "Standard MBR" aka "DOS disklabel", and GPT are both format definitions. Format of partition table. On Linux, the traditional partitioning tool, 'fdisk', knows several disklabel formats, but not GPT. Another tool, 'parted' (which has neat graphical interface 'gparted'), can create and edit GPT too.

Windows has something called "Dynamic disks". Not sure whether that involves partition tables, or is just MS version of logical volume management, like LVM2 on Linux.

On boot, BIOS must be able to read the boot loader, and the bootloader must be able to locate and load OS. Thus, one or the another has to be able to interpret the partition table. Actually, looking at GUID Partition Table - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia gives the impression that it is sufficient for the bootloader and OS to be up to the task without touching the BIOS at all.


Personally, the most mind-boggling feat is how a fakeRAID can boot from rAID0 partition, because there the BIOS must be able to read stripes until it can hand the operation to the OS driver. But that is an another matter, even though it does show that extensions of BIOS can go a long way.

[cylix]

Re: "Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

Interestingly enough win7 actually creates a system partition of a 100mb when it decides that you are creating a primary partition that is too large.

GPT is somewhat annoying when dealing with compatibility images. If you knowingly move to GPT to handle multiple terabyte partitions it's a good idea to invest some time ensuring your recovery images can support such file systems.

If you have had any exposure to the BMCs shipping with newer system boards you might be interested to note they are generally linux based. Thus you have an operating system riding ontop of legacy cmos which is acting as the "bedding" for the rest of the OS.

[Psycho101]

Re: "Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

No, Windows 7 always creates that 100MB system partition. It has nothing to do with how large your main partition is. The 100MB system partition is used not only to store the bootloader/bootfiles, but also used for the BitLocker drive encryption.

The only way to stop Win 7 creating the 100MB system partition is to create a single partition yourself using diskpart or a similar program of your choosing. Windows will then use the main partition for the boot files.

Note that if creating your own partition manually to avoid wasting space and are using a SSD, you need to correctly align the partition to the SSD's erase blocks to avoid clusters crossing erase block boundaries.With the 100MB partition in place, Win 7 has correctly aligned both it and all subsequent partitions correctly. The 100MB partition is aligned to 1024k which is an acceptable value for any SSD with 512K erase blocks.

[artdrivers]

Re: "Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

Thanks mv2devnull for the link. GUID Partition Table - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I like this. Interesting especially the OS support of GPT table. If FREEBSD and Linux (even X86) support "Boot from GPT on PC/BIOS" Microsoft will need to be finding a way soon.
It is much more informative than what I "red" on it back in March or even June 2009. It's hard to believe with all the Huge TB hard drives. As long as we have had them. The only Windows option is to have a seperate Partition with a windows OS on it. Then Windows disk manage that RAID5 of TB's to a GPT for storage. Seperate from the OS. Although I believe it works the majority of the time. I can see where sometimes I would have search issues. As in large programs that need to load on C:/ I would'nt always know which ones they would be either, and the programs that load part on a RAID5 and the other part on the Windows disk. Good luck getting them completely uninstalled. Even with a good uninstaller. I only use about half of the space on my hard drives anyway. They seem to be easier & faster to sweep and defragment this way.
Using GPT Drives
I believe a cure for it is not to far in the future.

[mv2devnull]

Re: "Goodbye BIOS" As I Know It.

I doubt MS makes a move. They probably rather see EFI-systems to show up than augment ntloader. Every OS booting from GPT without EFI would clearly undermine the efforts to replace BIOS with EFI. But it is up to the companies to either push the EFI or bury it.

It is quite standard and recommended practice to have a small disk volume for the OS and separate volume(s) for data (and backup). For example the SSD for OS. Quick to load. No application is really big. It is the data that can consume petabytes.


Some time ago I saw Psycho101 mention "alignment" and now My brain hurts. Reading around, I found that partition alignment is not just for SSD, but for RAID systems, for USB pendrives, and for latest generation HDD (WD EARS) too. Thanks!