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issues with uefi, more than 6 drives, ahci, windows 8.

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superboyac:
What you said at least about large drives is one of the "draws" of UEFI, IIRC -- perhaps number of drives too, not sure. I happen to not have drives that exceed 1 TB, nor simultaneously connect that many so have "escaped"...What I was lured by was the support for a large number of the same type of "first-class" partition -- i.e. MBR only supported up to 4 primary partitions and with UEFI you get many more of the "standard" partition.

It turned out though that there is an additional headache taking a drive from one machine to another if using UEFI -- I found the drive wasn't enough (at least for what I tried), it was also necessary to modify something that is stored in the PC.  With MBR / legacy setups, I could take a drive from one machine and use it on another without any other "state" that needed to be transferred -- with some caveats regarding hardware.  This additional complication was enough of a turn-off for me that I now look for motherboards that support MBR / legacy mode.  I don't know how much longer this approach will be viable though...

-ewemoa (January 19, 2015, 12:49 AM)
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Yes!  I remember this, it may even be a thread on here from a few years ago.  It's true...I had moved a desktop to my living room, and switched a couple of the hard drives around.  And the computer wouldn't boot after removing one of the drives.  Also, I moved a large drive from the working computer into the new one, which didn't yet have a large drive.  Well...I had to do all sorts of things with Intel RST, and there was a point where it kept asking me to format the whole drive.  Man, it was messy.
I think someone here explained that with uefi or something, there is boot information that is stored and distributed on all the connected drives, so if one is disconnected it won't boot anymore because info is missing.  Anyway, it was a big headache and I don't even remember how I solved it.  I think i just didn't use the large drives for the problem pc.

superboyac:
i thought i learned that you need uefi for large drives (>2tb)-superboyac (January 18, 2015, 11:36 PM)
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You can use non-system drives >2TB if the partition table is GPT and not MBR. You must also be running a 64-bit operating system because a 32-bit OS cannot address more than 2.2TB.

UEFI is a replacement for the system BIOS, not a drive partition manager. You only need UEFI if your system drive is >2TB because a BIOS cannot boot from a GPT partition table.

Windows can support up to 24 drives (C through Z), but your motherboard will limit the number of internal drives your system can support.   If you have more than 4 drives in a PC, you really should be looking at offloading them to a NAS box.

-xtabber (January 19, 2015, 01:14 PM)
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I believe you are correct.  All my large drives are GPT, it is a 64 bit system.
Interesting point, you say I only need uefi if I use the large drive for my system drive.  I am not!  My system drive is a small SSD drive, about 200GB. 
I'm going to reinstall the OS using a different method and see if it works.

ewemoa:
I think someone here explained that with uefi or something, there is boot information that is stored and distributed on all the connected drives, so if one is disconnected it won't boot anymore because info is missing.
-superboyac (January 19, 2015, 10:04 PM)
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I don't know about the info being stored in a distributed manner -- may be that happens -- in the local case I believe what I wasn't terribly happy about was that some critical info is stored in the PC's nvram that is required for appropriately using the disk (specifically regarding booting).  Having to manage that was something I didn't feel like doing -- at least not at that time :)

ewemoa:
UEFI is a replacement for the system BIOS, not a drive partition manager. You only need UEFI if your system drive is >2TB because a BIOS cannot boot from a GPT partition table.
-xtabber (January 19, 2015, 01:14 PM)
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Sorry for making confusing remarks regarding UEFI / GPT.  I had them fused inappropriately :)

Shades:
If you didn't do this already, make your system's boot slower. In BIOS/UEFI you have an option to turn 'fastboot' off.

When you go for the limits, that is usually the first thing I would do. With 'fastboot' turned on, it is a possibility that not all drives properly register themselves in BIOS/UEFI during boot. If the watts of your power supply is more or less equal match the watts required to run your system, the drives may not have enough power available to spin up properly during boot.

In that case it doesn't matter at all what filesystem you are using on your HD's. But it can be fixed by adjusting a tiny setting in BIOS/UEFI. I was running a 6-drive Linux server here, but that has been reduced to 5 drives, because hd capacity is cheap and I could combine content from 2 drives to one. The other 4 are part of a software-based RAID setup.

The suggestion in a previous pot about getting a NAS solution is solid with the amount of drives you are running.

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