TeraByte Unlimited

My trusty MBR machine is dying and I am in the process of buying new, which obviously will be UEFI. I have used BIBM for many years which has been the rock solid backbone of my system running Windows and several Linuxes, worth several times what I paid for it. Now looking into using BIU I read the section "Limitations & UEFI Issues" which is worrying me.

Unstable software drives me nuts and is one factor in my choice of Linux systems. I have to question if I should change tactic and use multiple VM's instead of multi-booting with BIU.

What is the likelihood of being hit by instability if I try to multi-boot several OS's with BIU? What have others experienced? Is it a function of the motherboard model?

rustleg,

You don't have to worry. Once you get the hang of BIU it is just as easy to multi-boot as BIBM.

So you are saying that the issues mentioned are permanently fixable? I got the impression that some of them might happen from time to time without being able to find a permanent solution.

Can you post a link to these issues? I've had no problems.

The issues are mentioned in the BIU manual bootituefi_en_manual.pdf page 6.

Thanks. I've had no issues.

Thanks Brian. Perhaps TB support will explain the implications of the section of their manual.

rustleg,

I don't think I've ever read that section of the manual before. I can see how it could be a little frightening. My guess, and it's only that, is that the issues described were much more relevant in early UEFI systems and less so on systems that are new today.

I used to have a system that could be booted in either legacy or UEFI mode. I tried to use BIU on that system and never did get behaving consistently. I gave up and used the system in legacy mode with BIBM for years.

Prompted by the impending demise of Windows 10, I now have a system purchased last year and have had few BIU related issues. I do have a much simpler environment than you describe. My extent of multibooting consists of two copies of Windows 11 and one instance of IFL, but it's pretty stable.

When setting things up, I did get a few instances of Unable to open BOOTIT.DAT, but ignoring it seemed to cause no problems.

I occasionally get a situation where BIU has stopped booting when the system boots and I have to reinstall it, not reconfigure it, just reinstall it. I think that happens only after doing something unusual like restoring the whole disk even though BIU was installed in the system state whose backup I restored.

Overall, for my limited multiboot setup, I consider BIU a success. Certainly worth a try.

If it's not too late, I do advise creating an image backup of the system as received before doing anything else with it.

Thanks for the info Bob. As I already have a licensed BIU I guess I'll have a go. I will be ordering the new PC without any OS since I don't want Win 11. I plan to buy a retail copy of Windows 10 and then disconnect it from the internet after getting it up to date. I only need it for Excel / Access (with extensive VBA macros) and I can use a NTFS partition for the data files which I can access from Linux, so I don't need to keep updating Windows and Office.

rustleg,

When installing Linux, it's similar to how you do it with BIBM. Except the Grub boot manager is installed to the EFI System Partition, not to the Linux partition.