Enable UEFI or not?

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I have an 8ish year old HP Pavilion dv6 laptop that is using legacy boot mode.  It does not have a TPM.  The original OS was Win7, it’s now running Win10 22H2.  Win10 is not supported by HP on this machine.

I was researching enabling UEFI but after reading numerous reports of problems I am skeptical to proceed.  My consideration for UEFI was solely for secure boot.  The conversion of MBR to GPT is scary to me and since this laptop is not a Win11 candidate I don’t know how to measure the value UEFI would bring, if any.  I would appreciate any thoughts on this.

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opti1

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I’ll be following the responses you get.

I expect folks will want to know more about your laptop, like whether it is 32-bit or 64-bit and whether it’s the Home edition or the Pro edition…

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Peobody,

I recently did that conversion for a friend and here’s how it went.

1. First and most IMPORTANT make an IMAGE backup of the drive! I used Macrium Reflect Free.
2. Attempted to do the conversion with the C:\Windows\System32\MBR2GPT.exe program provide in Windows. It was unable to make the conversion. Not particularly uncommon for Windows built in utilities.
3. Tried several Free Partition programs (Partition Wizard Mini-Tool Partition Wizard, EaseUS Partition Master, AOMEI Partition Assistant, etc. All required purchasing an upgrade to do the conversion.
4. Found a deal on AOMEI Partition Assistant and made the purchase. Worked as advertised.
5. Rebooted bringing up the Boot Menu and made the appropriate selection.
6. Enabled Safe Boot
7. DONE!

Safe Boot gives you extra protection against Malware so IMHO it’s worth the effort to enable it. Of course YMMV!

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Other experts may weigh in, but for me the biggest reason to use UEFI is to handle HDDs larger than 2 TBs (MBR drive size limit) and files larger than 4 GBs (MBR file size limit). If you see no need to access HDDs > 2 TBs or individual files > 4 GBs, then stay with the legacy mode and MBR.

Have you checked to see if this 8 yr old motherboard BIOS offers the UEFI boot option?

The MBR to GPT conversion provided by Microsoft is safe, but depending upon the hardware in the laptop can take a very long time (like many hours) giving you to impression that it is not working. If you do convert make sure you have an external image and recovery stick ready just in case, and don’t stop the process once you start it.

HTH, Dana:))

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IMHO I buy my way into UEFI.  If it wasn’t shipped with it on, I leave it off.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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DanR, windbg, opti1

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Thanks all. The existing BIOS does contain the UEFI option but I do not have a need for a +2 TB HD nor files larger than 4 GB so I’ll stick with legacy boot.

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I realize you have already decided, but to address your main reason for wanting a UEFI boot… are you certain the laptop has that capability in the first place? Early UEFI PCs didn’t have secure boot ability (and typically shipped set up for legacy boot, even if the OS allowed UEFI boot, as Windows 7 does, at least in its 64-bit version). Windows 8 certified PCs had to ship with secure boot, but at the time that Windows 7 shipped, I don’t believe there was any such thing as secure boot yet.

My desktop PC has such a setup. It uses a second gen i-series CPU (Sandy Bridge), an i5-2500k (overclocked to 4500 MHz, all-core), on an Asus P8P67 Deluxe motherboard, released during the Win 7 era. When I put Windows 7 on it after I bought the board and built the PC around it, I did initially use a MBR setup, but I changed it to GPT not long after that. It worked fine, but there are no secure boot options. Windows 7 would not know what to do with them anyway!

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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I’ve done a few with MBR2GPT but booting from a windows PE disk, not within windows and have had no issues. Pretty good write-up here if you decide to go with it.

https://scottiestech.info/2017/11/12/convert-your-windows-10-boot-drive-from-mbr-to-gpt/

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JC Zorkoff

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Peobody wrote:

Thanks all. The existing BIOS does contain the UEFI option but I do not have a need for a +2 TB HD nor files larger than 4 GB so I’ll stick with legacy boot.

You probably do need a >2TB external HDD for backup images and data backups.
If you download Windows ISO files they are >4GB.
If you download HD movies they are >4GB.

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You don’t need to boot from the backup drive, though. You can still use GPT data drives if the system booted from a legacy setup.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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You can put ~480 4GB files on a 2TB drive so it’d take a LOT of HD movies to fill one up!

It’d also take a LOT of data/image backups of the OS to fill one up (i.e. a full image backup of my Win10 Pro 22H2 drive, all 3 partitions, is 36.9GB which means I can fit ~53 of them on a 2TB drive!)

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Drcard:)) wrote:

the biggest reason to use UEFI is to handle HDDs larger than 2 TBs (MBR drive size limit) and files larger than 4 GBs (MBR file size limit).

There’s a grain of truth in there, but that’s not quite correct.

You do need a GPT partition table to handle disks larger than 2TB, but you only need UEFI if you intend to *boot* from said disk. You can use a GPT data disk in a MBR-boot system. (I have two 8TB GPT data disks on my Win7 MBR system.)

The 4GB file size limit was true for FAT32 file systems, but not for NTFS. In fact, I have dozens of VM virtual disk files, all much larger than 4GB, on NTFS partitions on MBR disks.

File size limits are dependent on the file system, not partition size or disk size. FWIW, the NTFS structure is actually identical for both MBR and GPT disks – so understandably you’re not going to get different file size limits just by switching the style of partition table. The NTFS file system can handle files much larger than 4GB on both MBR and GPT partition tables.

 

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Andy M, Just another Forum Poster, Alex5723, windbg, steeviebops, cyberSAR

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Just another Forum Poster wrote:

(i.e. a full image backup of my Win10 Pro 22H2 drive, all 3 partitions, is 36.9GB

A full backup image of my PC is ~90GB backed to 4TB external SSD drive which also holds (4K BluRay) movies as large as 30GB each.

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