I'm having some difficulty installing Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 on an Intel Server platform.

The server specs is as follows:

• Intel Grizzly Pass Server System - R2308GZ4GC
• 2x Intel Xeon 2620 - 2.0 GHZ - BX80621E52620
• 132 GB of Memory REG-DIMM - TS1GKR72V6H
• 4x Seagate Constellation ES 2TB 3.5" 7200rpm 6GB/S - ST32000645NS
• Intel Big Laurel 4CH 6G SAS RAID 512MB - RS2BL040

On the Intel RAID Controller Setup, I have setup the HDD to be in RAID-0 - for testing purposes. (Ultimately configured in RAID-5)

So, the total size of HDD space I can use is 7.6 TB something... When I install the Server OS's, they don't seem to go beyond 2 TB (1.76 TB)

I have read up on EFI and UEFI boot, and this seems to work in 2012, but I could not install any drivers for the motherboard... So, I also tried EFI for 2008R2, and this worked while installing the OS, it did not however work with the Windows Boot Manager option in the BIOS. It kept on freezing once it tries to load the partition.

My idea was to allocate the complete 8 TB for the OS, and load a few VM's on there. I have now started with a new approach where I'll have a 256 GB OS Partition, and a secondary 7.5 TB Data partition.

Oh, and I also did a diskpart - convert disk to gpt whilst installing 2008R2. The whole disk was accessible, 7.6TB

Can anyone please clarify that EFI/UEFI is meant for larger boot volumes? Bigger than 2TB. If I were to have an ideal situation where my OS is run on a SSD, 256GB, and I can attach the 8 TB drives as normal disk to the OS? I'm I correct in saying that if I wanted to boot from a 8TB partition, I would need to force the BIOS to boot from EFI? The limit for MBR is 2 TB as far as I know now...

*FYI: The motherboard is EFI-ready