EFI vs MBR - Installing Windows Server 2008 R2 or 2012 on 8TB
- by Riaan de Lange
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