2008R2 UEFI question

A

ashman

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Mar 28, 2011
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So I have inherited a server at a client that was recently purchased and setup by the 'other IT guy' who is no longer around. Server is a Dell T320 with a Perc H310 card with three 3TB SATA hard drives. Server 2008R2 is installed and there are three partitions, the boot partition is 250GB, the second partition is 1.8TB and I can format that, the third partition is 3.5TB and I can't do anything with it. Research seems to indicate that the server should of been installed with UEFI BIOS, but installing 2008R2 with a UEFI BIOS seems to be only be done via a specially crafted USB drive? It turns on this server was bought without an OS and that 2008R2 was installed after the fact. I can't really afford to blow this server away and reinstall but I am not sure there is another way to utilize the 3.5TB of disk space vie UEFI without doing so? Is there or am I going to have to craft a special USB drive and reinstall the OS?
 
Windows pairs UEFI and GPT together.

Sometimes msinfo32 will tell you if it's in UEFI mode or not. Otherwise, the disk layout will. UEFI will have an explicit EFI System Partition.

If it's not in UEFI, you would need to reinstall to get it in UEFI mode. As far as a "specially crafted" USB, well, not -really-. UEFI doesn't play well with NTFS USB sticks so the installation USB would need to be FAT32, which is fine, Windows doesn't care. They are not hard to make.

http://www.jaxidian.org/update/2011/01/28/199/

Be sure your BIOS is set to allow the USB stick to boot in UEFI mode.
 
Are you able to delete the 3.5TB partition and create two smaller partitions? May need to be done outside of Windows or from the command line if Disk Management is not allowing any functions.
 
I am not able to do anything with the 3.5TB partition inside of windows no, I was considering a third party windows partition utility though, however I think I may have no choice but to reinstall as MBR has a hard 2TB limit.
 
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You don't need a special formatted USB drive to install as GPT under UEFI, it's only an option (Installing from DVD is the other option). When you boot the server to install the OS, you just need to make sure you select to boot as UEFI, which will allow the disk to be installed as GPT and thus larger than 2.2TB volumes.

Server 2008 R2 supports UEFI/GTP boot drives (I've set it up this way before), but I don't know if the physical server in question does.
 
I wonder if I could do an image based backup in 2008R2, redo the install under UEFI/GTP and then restore the backup? Would that work?
 
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