I'm a bit confused about the requirements for booting Linux using the 3TB hard drives that are now coming out. I understand that they can be used as secondary (non-boot) drives without any problems. From what I've read online, it appears that you need a motherboard with EFI rather than plain BIOS. Is this an absolute requirement, with no bootloader workaround for any non-compliant motherboards?
On a side note, are there any non-Intel branded motherboards that come with EFI? I'm intrigued by the PDF manual I downloaded of MSI's new AMD Fusion mini-ITX board E350IA-E45: http://www.msi.com/product/mb/E350IA-E45.html#/?div=Manual On page 22 of the multi-lingual manual is the following "BIOS" option: Built-in EFI Shell Use this item to enter the EFI Shell. Moreover there is a screenshot on page 21 confirming this. The option can be found in the "Save & Exit" tab, beneath the section heading "Boot Override" and above possibly another option "UEFI: USB Flash Disk 1.11" . The BIOS update comes in at a fairly large 4MB (after unzipping). Opening the BIOS file in Emacs and doing a search for EFI shows human-readable text like "EFI_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL" or "EFI_VOLUME_CORRUPTED". Strangely, the EFI support isn't advertised in the above MSI web page. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List http://lists.linux.org.ph/mailman/listinfo/plug Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
