Support for GPT boot drive

[eldiener]

It would really be nice if BIBM supported booting OSs from a GPT drive rather than just an MBR drive. I believe an MBR drive is limited to 2 TB while a GPT drive is supported above 2 TBs. As people buy drives for new computers they are going to want to buy drives greater than 2 TB as larger drives become available. I admit I use BIBM for its multi-boot capabilities and not for its feature that allows more than 4 primary partitions on a MBR drive. Terabyte could still continue to support MBR drives and its EMBR feature which allows more than 4 primary partitions on a MBR drive, but I really would like to see it support GPT drives for multi-booting. Is there any move by Terabyte to do this in an upcoming release of BIBM ?

I ask for a practical reason since I am building a new computer system and I really like BIBM as a multi-boot manager. The necessity to have to buy a 2 TB drive and configure it as an MBR drive in order to use BIBM is bothersome. I would much rather buy 4 TB drives or greater and be able to multi-boot with BIBM using GPT drives. It would really be nice to hear that Terabyte is aware of this issue and is planning an upcoming version of BIBM which supports multi-booting off of a GPT drive.

[TeraByte Support]

the trouble is they really messed up, they should have left the kernel
loading process the same, boot the os partition to load the kernel and only
use the EFI System (EMBRM) as a start point instead of MBR (really, they
could have left the MBR code and had the efi system for extending the bios
and things for pre-os environment to store things). The problem now is
there is no real standard for loading kernels.


"eldiener" wrote in message news:10885@public.bootitbm...

It would really be nice if BIBM supported booting OSs from a GPT drive
rather than just an MBR drive. I believe an MBR drive is limited to 2 TB
while a GPT drive is supported above 2 TBs. As people buy drives for new
computers they are going to want to buy drives greater than 2 TB as larger
drives become available. I admit I use BIBM for its multi-boot capabilities
and not for its feature that allows more than 4 primary partitions on a MBR
drive. Terabyte could still continue to support MBR drives and its EMBR
feature which allows more than 4 primary partitions on a MBR drive, but I
really would like to see it support GPT drives for multi-booting. Is there
any move by Terabyte to do this in an upcoming release of BIBM ?

I ask for a practical reason since I am building a new computer system and I
really like BIBM as a multi-boot manager. The necessity to have to buy a 2
TB drive and configure it as an MBR drive in order to use BIBM is
bothersome. I would much rather buy 4 TB drives or greater and be able to
multi-boot with BIBM using GPT drives. It would really be nice to hear that
Terabyte is aware of this issue and is planning an upcoming version of BIBM
which supports multi-booting off of a GPT drive.

[Brian K]

eldiener wrote:
> I ask for a practical reason since I am building a new computer system and
> I really like BIBM as a multi-boot manager. The necessity to have to buy a
> 2 TB drive and configure it as an MBR drive in order to use BIBM is
> bothersome.

eldiener,

You could instead buy a small SSD and use this for BIBM and your various OS. Much faster than having OS on a HD. Have your data on HDs.

[eldiener]

TeraByte Support wrote:
> the trouble is they really messed up, they should have left the kernel
> loading process the same, boot the os partition to load the kernel and
> only
> use the EFI System (EMBRM) as a start point instead of MBR (really, they
> could have left the MBR code and had the efi system for extending the bios
>
> and things for pre-os environment to store things). The problem now is
> there is no real standard for loading kernels.
>
>
> "eldiener" wrote in message news:10885@public.bootitbm...
>
> It would really be nice if BIBM supported booting OSs from a GPT drive
> rather than just an MBR drive. I believe an MBR drive is limited to 2 TB
> while a GPT drive is supported above 2 TBs. As people buy drives for new
> computers they are going to want to buy drives greater than 2 TB as larger
>
> drives become available. I admit I use BIBM for its multi-boot capabilities
>
> and not for its feature that allows more than 4 primary partitions on a MBR
>
> drive. Terabyte could still continue to support MBR drives and its EMBR
> feature which allows more than 4 primary partitions on a MBR drive, but I
> really would like to see it support GPT drives for multi-booting. Is there
>
> any move by Terabyte to do this in an upcoming release of BIBM ?
>
> I ask for a practical reason since I am building a new computer system and
> I
> really like BIBM as a multi-boot manager. The necessity to have to buy a 2
>
> TB drive and configure it as an MBR drive in order to use BIBM is
> bothersome. I would much rather buy 4 TB drives or greater and be able to
> multi-boot with BIBM using GPT drives. It would really be nice to hear that
>
> Terabyte is aware of this issue and is planning an upcoming version of BIBM
>
> which supports multi-booting off of a GPT drive.

"the trouble is they really messed up...". Who are you talking about ? Cannot all major OSs boot off of GPT drive partitions nowadays ? Why could not BIBM's multi-boot manager simply start the boot code for an OS in a GPT partition just as BIBM starts the boot code for an OS in a MBR partition ? Would you please offer more of an explanation of the problem(s) BIBM faces in doing this ?

[eldiener]

Brian K wrote:
> eldiener wrote:
> > I ask for a practical reason since I am building a new computer system and
> > I really like BIBM as a multi-boot manager. The necessity to have to buy a
> > 2 TB drive and configure it as an MBR drive in order to use BIBM is
> > bothersome.
>
> eldiener,
>
> You could instead buy a small SSD and use this for BIBM and your various OS. Much
> faster than having OS on a HD. Have your data on HDs.

This is a possible solution but would often necessitate using a separate Windows drive letter for all data outside of the installed c: drive, as you suggest above. This is because Windows installations are large and if I want to install more than one version of Windows, which I normally do, I will be eating up my SSD drive given that SSD drives, if they exist, are much smaller than hard drives.

My current Windows7 system is over 250 GB, my current Windows 8.1 system is over 200 GB, and if I installed Windows 10 my system will most probably end up greater than either. Further I have boot partitions for various Linux distros taking up space on my current boot drive ( admittedly very little ). An SSD drive gets eaten up that way pretty quickly, and even 512GB SSD drives are very expensive.

The whole point of having BIBM support GPT drives is so that I can have a 4TB+ boot drive, and not have to worry if an OS gets too large on that drive since I have a huge amount of space.

I am certainly not against SSD drives but right now I view the price of SSD drives, as well as the limitation on their sizes, as a ripoff for computer consumers. There is practically no reason, except supply and demand, why SSD drives should not be priced equally, if not less, than hard drives, or why SSD drive cannot be terabytes in size.

[DrTeeth]

On Tue, 19 Jan 2016 11:36:55 PST, just as I was about to take a herb,
eldiener disturbed my reverie and wrote:

>I am certainly not against SSD drives but right now I view the price of SSD drives, as well as the limitation on their sizes, as a ripoff for computer consumers.
>There is practically no reason, except supply and demand, why SSD drives should not be priced equally, if not less, than hard drives, or why SSD drive cannot be terabytes in size.

I will not buy them for those very reasons plus a few others. First,
how often does one reboot the PC or load/reload apps in a single
sitting? I keep everything I need loaded in memory and hardly touch my
pagefile. Second, I have heard that SSDs have a tendency to die
suddenly so I prefer to stay with regular HDs.
--
Cheers,

DrT

"If you want to find out what is wrong
with democracy, spend five minutes with
the average voter." - Winston Churchill

[Brian K]

DrTeeth wrote:
> I have heard that SSDs have a tendency to die
> suddenly so I prefer to stay with regular HDs.
> --

DrT,

My understanding is the opposite. SSDs outlast HDs.

I love SSDs. They are a piece of hardware that make an immediate performance difference. You can double your RAM and not notice the difference but you will notice the difference with a SSD. Price wise they are getting cheaper. I recently bought a 120 GB SSD for $70. Also a 240 GB SSD for $100. Australian $ (about 5 US cents the way our dollar is going). My Windows OS use less than 25 GB of data so I can fit multiple Windows OS on a SSD. I don't run OS on HDs anymore.

You get fantastic speeds when you use 2 SSDs for backups or restores. I keep my images on a second SSD.

[DrTeeth]

On Tue, 19 Jan 2016 13:27:34 PST, just as I was about to take a herb,
Brian K disturbed my reverie and wrote:

>You get fantastic speeds when you use 2 SSDs for backups or restores. I keep my images on a second SSD.

That is a good point, but surely one only sees a performance benefit
when the HD read/write speed is in play, viz loading apps or swapfile
usage? If a program is already loaded I cannot see how a drive's
performance comes into play. I have 3 x 2TB drives in my main PC and
an external one.

Most of my backing up (other OSs and other PCs across network) is done
whilst I am using my main partition and performance is not an issue
and I backup my main OS when I have finished using it at night and get
IfW to shutdown (ditto about performance).

Unless I could see an increase in performance in loaded apps, I would
have wasted any money spent on SSDs. Any spare money now goes on ham
radio, which I took up again after a looong break.

Best wishes.
--
Cheers,

DrT

"If you want to find out what is wrong
with democracy, spend five minutes with
the average voter." - Winston Churchill

[eldiener]

Whether you use SSD or hard drives for the boot drive the issue remains the same. It would be much better for BIBM end-users if BIBM supported multi-booting using a GPT drive as well as the current support for MBR/EMBR boot drives, since it would allow end-user to buy drives greater than 2 TB for their boot drive and than use it as a GPT drive for multi-booting.

How about it Terabyte ? You have a great product which end-users appreciate. But please don't stick your head in the sand and act like this is not an issue, whether now or for the near future.

Thanks !

[DrTeeth]

On Thu, 21 Jan 2016 07:44:13 PST, just as I was about to take a herb,
eldiener disturbed my reverie and wrote:

>It would be much better for BIBM end-users if BIBM supported multi-booting using a GPT drive as well as the current support for MBR/EMBR boot drives
I agree 110%. However, I do not know if this is even possible or TBU
is keeping this for the next "big thing" in BIBM v2.
--
Cheers,

DrT

"If you want to find out what is wrong
with democracy, spend five minutes with
the average voter." - Winston Churchill