PowerEdge 720 LifeCycle + UEFI Question

Question

Hi All, Hoping someone can shed some light. It's been a while sine I've had to do a baremetal install on a server and got a few questions. Just got a new PowerEdge R720 server with iDRAC7 Enterprise. Wanted to use the UEFI functions so using the Lifecycle Controller I selected the option to deploy the OS (Win Server 2012 R2) I select the correct OS and then selected UEFI boot. Rebooted the machine and booted from the DVD when prompted. I get presented with the 3 partitions (System Recovery, OS and unallocated). The unallocated partition is the virtual disk being presented by the RAID controller. The problem being is that it is formatted to use MBR rather than GPT. Is this how all dell servers ship by default? I had to tell Windows to go into recovery mode and got into a cmd prompt and ran DISKPART to convert the partition in to GPT. Then I rebooted and went through the lifecycle process again and rebooted again to boot from the DVD. I now only have 1 partition (the virtual disk) and windows installed fine. To summarize after my wall of text.... 1. Whats the disadvantage of doing the above i.e losing the system recovery partition etc 2. Do all Dell servers ship with the partition set as MBR by default? Why wasn't the system intelligent enough to change the type to GPT when I selected UEFI mode in Lifecycle Controller? 3. Is there any advantage to using UEFI mode. I thought the whole idea of UEFI was to provide better integration between the OS and the firmware. If using the BIOS mode offered this...whats the point of using the lifecycle controller in the first place. I hope that made sense :) Any answers greatly appreciated.

DELL-Bo Pham · Answer

Hello,

I suspect based on your description, that the system did not ship in the UEFI mode. During the server order the default is non-UEFI mode. However, I've seen the factory make a mistake and put it in non-UEFI(BIOS mode) despite the request for UEFI. If this is the case then that would explain why you would be rightfully questioning the setup.

If the system was actually in UEFI mode (must be set from within the System Bios setup, not in the LCC OS Deployment) then you would not need to convert to from MBR to GPT.

If left in non-UEFI mode, you may run into a problem in the future when trying to reconfigure an array larger than 2TB

Please confirm the mode and let us know if that was the issue.

During POST, press F2 and choose iDRAC Settings/Boot Settings and confirm UEFI mode or BIOS mode. Alternatively, you can press F10 for LCC menu and select "System Setup" to enter the System BIOS settings.

Jim Bartlett · Answer

M1DDY, Did you get an answer to question #1? I have always wondered if I am losing something if I nuke the default System Recovery Partition, which happens of course when you convert to GPT.

PowerEdge Hardware General

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