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I have here a little bit uncommon system: its primary hard disk can't have an old, DOS (MBR) partition table, only a GPT type. It is an outer restriction, that nothing can be done about. It seems as if the firmware silently rejected the disk writes to a DOS (MBR) partition table.

I am thinking about a Windows Server 2008 install into that system. Is it somehow possible?

peterh
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1 Answers1

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When you say "EFI-only partition table" I suspect you're talking about a GUID Partition Table (GPT). Per Microsoft, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 can boot from a GPT, provided you're running an x64 build in a system with UEFI firmware.

Evan Anderson
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  • While systems with a legacy BIOS cannot boot from GPT disks, you still could use a MBR-partitioned USB stick for the boot manager data (100 MB is Windows' default partition size for this, so pretty much every USB stick made in the last 10 years should do) and have all the rest on the GPT disk. Technically, ["hybrid MBR"](http://superuser.com/questions/297776/windows-on-a-hybrid-mbr-gpt) solutions could achieve this even without the need for an MBR-partitioned disk, but this is far from being supported and not recommended. – the-wabbit Mar 23 '15 at 15:24