UEFI vs Legacy BIOS Boot | GPT vs MBR (DOS) | Explained

in this video I go over the differences between UEFI and legacy boot I wanted to preface this video that this is targeted towards the general population so if you're just getting into it and you don't understand what these are I'm about to lay them out see you have a better understanding I'm setting guidelines not necessarily rules if you get highly skilled in these concepts you can bend and even break these rules sometimes in mix-and-match however for today I want to help the general population so it's best if you stick to these guidelines you'll have far less headaches by doing this just know if you do need something else as far as an advanced setup it is possible but far more difficult okay with that out of the way let's jump right in here and cover what is UEFI the benefits to you fi is you get advanced graphics for like let's say your bootloader wants to do a fancy background and have icons for each one of your boot drives you can easily set that up in a UEFI and also there's greater support for large boot drives if you have over 2 terabytes that you want to boot directly from UEFI is what you'll be using now in that same vein you'll probably want to use GPT and what that means is that's the partition table so when you first plug in your drive you'll get a prompt that says hey do you want GPT or MBR sometimes it's dawson linux MBR is kind of how Windows refers to it but you'll get those prompts and if it's a large drive it needs to be GPT otherwise the largest partition you can make is 2 terabytes so very important to know when you're first getting into this if you do a GPT drive you're probably going to want to use UEFI and to set that up you need to make sure your bios settings are on point and make sure that you go through and make sure you EFI boot is enabled you want to disable legacy boot and disable all legacy boot options that go with it in some motherboards you're literally disabling three or four options before you switch completely over to UEFI again mileage will vary based on the computer but with those two concepts that's a UEFI boot just in a broad quick nutshell but that's the why you'd want to do that but I want to tell you it is far more difficult to set up in comparison to legacy boot which I'm about to get into legacy boot is mainly for compatibility so a lot of times when I do tutorials or let's say I'm loading something up in a VM I almost never will use GPT I will always just partition that quick share as just an MBR and then just go right in and put one partition on there make it bootable and off I go so that legacy boot also you cannot do a graphic interface for the boot menu it's just going to be the traditional text style menu and you the partition structure is set up completely different from GPT so with legacy boots you're limited to four partitions if you try to partition a big Drive more than four times you cannot and I've already talked about the size limitation but those are the main differences between the two MBR is kind of like the quick dirty way of doing things and I wanted to cover real fast boot loaders before ending this video because you need to understand how the boot loaders will interface with this structure so just remember for UEFI GPT drives for legacy boot you're going to want MBR or dos-based drives if you messed this up you can always use a partition tool like gparted or you know hearted magic there's a lot of different tools out there to assist you with this but just know that there's the actual partition table on the drive the and that that'll dictate what kind of boot that windows will look for Linux is a little more flexible than Windows and I'm about to get into that when I talk about boot loaders right now all right so boot loaders let's get into that first I'm going to cover Windows Windows uses boot MGR and it creates a small partition boot MGR is usually about 500 Meg's and it's usually called system reserved in here it has something called a BCD and that's just a data base that that bootloader needs to load your system when doing a lot of physical to virtual things in a data center a lot of times I would wipe this out and rebuild it in another thing and just take the data drive and move it and then recreate that it's entirely possible Windows has tools in there you know recovery so if you go into recovery go into the terminal you can do like fixed boot fix BCD and a lot of this I think is actually built in Windows tens a little different and they've done kind of compiled all those tools into one tool and the names escaping me right now but I'll probably make a separate video just over recovering and redoing that specific bootloader just know that boot MGR does that it is most of the time I find it does make an MBR based Drive however it does use UEFI for the most part especially in new laptops almost everything is UEFI so it kind of breaks that rule I kind of dictate at the front there but that's okay just know that it's gonna have that other partition and if you delete that partition you will not be able to boot in the past in Windows XP and way way long ago it was called ntldr and it was a completely different bootloader compared to this this bootloader came out Vista and kind of revamped it and made UEFI possible for Windows it is real hacky and I don't particularly like the bootloader if you're just booting Windows it's fine however if you're doing a multi boot I highly recommend you not using your windows bootloader as your primary because again I don't particularly care for it but that is how it is structured now let's get into grub that's the other big bootloader that I'm going to talk to you about today I'm not gonna talk about lilo and any other depreciated ones from the past because that's just it if they're in the past so for grub it has two main things grubs capable of doing legacy and UEFI fairly easily and it's important to know they they segregated out much easier than Windows does because Windows there's different versions of the booty MGR some do UEFI some don't and the older versions you have to stick with UEFI and GPT or do a legacy and MBR but for grub you have a ton of flexibility most of it is actually dictated by the boot portion so from the root it goes in to boot and from here you can actually put your grub configuration in and boot legacy from there now the efi directory which would be in boot is typically mounted to a completely separate partition and when that partition is set up for it's a GPT drive it'll be set up at the very very front of the drive so at 2048 your GPT drive will be there at a minimum of 300 Meg's I highly recommend at least 500 Meg's that's just my personal preference so when setting up a UEFI remember two partitions the very first partition 500 Meg's and it has to be classified as a efi filesystem and when you go to format that partition make sure it's fat32 otherwise the efi partition will not work now you didn't hear me say anything about the legacy portion of this when formatting a partition in the legacy boot or an MBR it's way easier because you're just doing one partition for instance if it's just a quick VM I'm thrown up I'll go ahead and just do one partition go into my protection editor of choice whether that's fdisk or gparted or whatever I want to use I just create one big partition it can be an ext 4 or NTFS I can do a lot of different things with that depending on the file system or the operating system I'm loading but the main thing with those MBR is is I create that one partition I mark it active and bootable and then away I go a lot of times I think it's CF disk all you have to do is do bootable it automatically I think marks it active just know that the legacy boot has something called flags when I say bootable or active that's a flag for it don't look for those flags and GPT because they don't exist so it's really important kind of know because I see some guides I was just doing a bunch of arch installs and kind of making my own script and I was going through other people's work because why reinvent the wheel and I was seeing a lot of mix-and-match and I was like hey this is gonna confuse some people coming to the space so just remember those two things the guidelines here guys is UEFI and GPT and you're gonna do two partitions for that well the first one will be formatted as a efi file system and also format it as fat32 and then for a legacy boot you just do legacy boot MBR or a DAWs and then you would just format it as your data drive and mark it bootable so when you make that partition make it bootable and then format it to whatever file system you need and you're good so that's it I just kind of wanted a hopefully that that makes sense it's a very complex subject and you can break those guidelines and like I said at the very start of this video I'm leaving articles in the description these two articles are fantastic and may help you kind of go through so this is kind of like the too long didn't read version of those articles that he's a very just high-level point-of-view 99% of you if you follow those guidelines it's gonna end up great for you if you break those guidelines hmm it may work but it's probably not especially on the first go-around it is very difficult to mix and match them and break these rules without seeing some consequence it just depends on what tools you use to partition your drive and other things like that when you get into the complexities of this but if you follow those guidelines a lot almost any tool will work I will warn you against using CF disk for GPT or UEFI because CF disk just isn't compatible with it it's an old Linux based tool that's mainly meant for the legacy and remember legacy boot came out in the 80s and UEFI kind of came in about in the late 2000s so very important to know the differences between the two most people would opt for the UEFI because it's pretty especially on my main system here of course I do ufi but it is far more difficult to install just because you have an extra partition and extra options and you just need to know how to set it up properly so that's it for today's video guys I hope you liked it I'm sure I'll get some comments please pay attention in the comments section because some people will probably drop some other helpful hints and articles in there and again check the description for the long winded version of this that kind of really breaks down and gets in the nitty-gritty of the two subjects you

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 261,015

Keywords: uefi, bios, bios vs uefi, gpt, mbr vs gpt, bios uefi vs legacy, legacy vs uefi bios, boot, gpt vs mbr boot speed, gpt vs mbr, what is uefi and legacy boot, uefi boot or legacy bios compatible, what is uefi boot, gpt vs mbr for windows 10, how to set legacy mode or uefi mode in bios, gpt vs mbr windows, gpt vs mbr windows 7, gpt vs mbr partition, how to boot into uefi mode, how to boot into uefi bios, how to boot into legacy mode, how to boot into legacy bios, chris titus tech

Id: 4Byg1MReCKI

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018