Trying to use UEFI for new disk

[c6guy]

I'm running a MSI P64N Diamond (ms-7320) motherboard with a Q6600 processor with Win7 64-bit OS I have a 2TB C: drive formatted with MBR. My bios vers is 1.3 and is the latest available.

I've read that formatting a new disk to UEFI instead of MBR makes it about 30% faster and more efficient. Also that MBR is limited to 2TB partition size and UEFI can go beyond 2TB in a single partition. I bought a new 3TB hard drive and want to clone my 2TB C: drive to one partition on the larger 3TB drive using UEFI instead of MBR.

Couple of questions to be able to clone my drive:

1) Does my motherboard and Bios support UEFI? I can't find any entry in my bios to activate UEFI.

2) I'm using Acronis 2012 and did the disk cloning but it defaulted to MBR and therefore cut off the total size of my 3TB disk to 2TB.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Elixer]

UEFI = Unified Extensible Firmware Interface

You are talking about GPT vs MBR.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The on-disk partition types are called GPT and MBR. The firmware on your mobo is either UEFI or BIOS. UEFI is required for GPT boot support. Your mobo does not support UEFI, so you cannot use a > 2TB HDD to boot off of. You can use it as a secondary data disk.

Also, the same NTFS filesystem is used for both GPT and MBR partitions, there's no performance increase with GPT.

 

[c6guy]

Wow -- thanks for all the replys -

Yes... I was confusing GPT with UEFI.

So it looks like one needs a motherboard which has UEFI (not bios) combined with formatting your drive using GPT and ONLY THEN with these two together can you have a bootable drive larger then 2TB.

Right?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Correct. You also need an OS capable of booting off of a GPT partition using UEFI boot. Win7 64-bit will do this.

Edit: However, you will not able able to clone a 2TB disk with an MBR/BIOS boot setting, you will have to install fresh, using UEFI boot.

 

[c6guy]

Understood. thanks for your help.

 

[murphyc]

Technically it's a limitation of Windows that the boot drive must be partitioned MBR when the firmware is BIOS, and must be partitioned GPT when the firmware is UEFI.

The problem is that due to bugs in some BIOS firmware, computers stall at the firmware bootstrap stage before the first bit of code off the disk is even loaded and executed. So it's not an unreasonable limitation on the part of Microsoft.