In fact many modern hardware does not come with a legacy BIOS but contains a UEFI firmware with a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) for BIOS. In addition, you need hardware that already has a UEFI firmware installed. Therefore, all current versions will work.

When you are thinking about giving UEFI a spin you can choose any 64 bit Windows since Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1.

In the following sections, I will demonstrate how to install Windows on a UEFI system and how to build bootable devices that can be accessed through BIOS as well as UEFI. In protected mode, the CPU is able to address all of the physical memory and thereby raises the 1MB limit on addressable memory which helps on systems with several Option ROMs for hardware devices. Also, the CPU is able to run boot loaders in protected mode whereas the BIOS forces the CPU to remain in real mode and requires it to switch into protected mode later which is a time consuming task and slows down the boot process. Instead of using a 512 byte boot sector, UEFI accepts boot loaders in files placed a the FAT formatted boot volume. This partitioning scheme is necessary to support large drives beyond the limitation mentioned above.įrom a technical point of view, the support for large drives is only one of many advantages offered by UEFI. The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) requires a GUID Partition Table (GPT) to boot from a device. The Master Boot Record (MBR) is the partitioning scheme necessary for the BIOS to understand partitions and boot from them. Only through those mechanism can modern operating systems be booted from hard disks and removable mediums. It provides a standardized interface to hardware.

The Basic Input / Output System (BIOS) has been around since the rise of the Personal Computer (PC). In this article I will provide a brief comparison of BIOS and UEFI before explaining how to create bootable devices for UEFI and install Windows on an UEFI system. But there are more very good reasons for making the switch. BIOS requires a MBR (Master Boot Record) formatted drive which is inherently limited to 2 TiB. The most prominent reason for thinking about booting through UEFI instead of BIOS is the availability of large drives.

How to format ssd from bios