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.