Blog: BIOS

UEFI and BIOS

Sep 12, 2011, 8:27 AM -05:00

The newer machines have a replacement for the traditional BIOS called UEFI. You can run the (GPT) GUID Partition Tables (replacement for MBR- Master Boot Record) independently of UEFI, but they are all a part of the same technology advancement to replace the MBR and BIOS technologies. UEFI is required only if you have a disk larger than 2T. UEFI provides a power-on shell similar to the BIOS power on shell but with more options.

An advantage of UEFI is boot times. My boot time on my laptop is consistently under 30 seconds from power on to logon. However, that's with out whole disk encryption setup.

Additional information can be found at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI

Networking UEFI BIOS

BIOS Hard Drive Passwords May Be Specific to the Computer Type/BIOS Version

Aug 13, 2010, 10:24 PM -05:00

I recently moved a hard drive from a ThinkPad T60 laptop to a ThinkPad T400. The hard drive had a BIOS password set, but it appeared to work normally in the T400. I could boot, enter the hard drive password, and access the disk. However, when I started having problems getting PGP to encrypt the hard drive, I decided to remove the hard drive password. The T400 could not remove it – the option was grayed-out in the BIOS. Luckily, I still had access to the T60, so I put the hard drive back in the T60 and was able to remove the hard drive password. I have now moved the hard drive to the T400 and I am able to set/remove the hard drive password at any time.