Windows 2TB limit on boot drives

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Posted on March 21, 2015

With the help of UEFI, you will be able to use Windows with 3TB or higher harddrive. If you have a older Bios < 2011 , you will be stuck with the 2TB limit. You only options are to upgrade the bios if available or upgrade the motherboard in the system. Also note this is for the boot device only. If you are going to use the drive as a backup disk. You will be able to use the full capacity. The restriction to 2TB on the boot device is due to the MBR partition table. Drives over 2TB need to have a GPT partition table and Windows will not boot from a GPT partition table unless UEFI is supported and enabled by the bios. The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI, pronounced as an initialism U-E-F-I or like "unify" without the n[a]) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. UEFI is meant to replace the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) firmware interface, originally present in all IBM PC-compatible personal computers.[2][3] In practice, most UEFI firmware images provide legacy support for BIOS services. UEFI can support remote diagnostics and repair of computers, even without another operating system.[4] Intel developed the original EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) specification. Some of the EFI's practices and data formats mirror those from Microsoft Windows.[5][6] In 2005, UEFI deprecated EFI 1.10 (the final release of EFI). The Unified EFI Forum manages the UEFI specification.
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Categories: Windows