Maximum boot drive size per bios chipset

[Drewh11]

Pavilion 500-164

This pc uses the  MSI MS-7778 (Jasmine) motherboard. How would I find the maximum allowed boot drive size? I have a 4tb HDD that I would like to format and use as the boot drive, but I've read that some bios chipsets top out at 2 tb.

Bios revision: JA2 v80.46 (10-03-2013)

AMD a8 64 bit

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

If your PC has a UEFI BIOS (which it should), you install W10 in EFI mode, and that should allow you to use all 4 TB of the drive.

The drive has to be formatted with the GPT partition scheme to work as a 4 TB boot drive, and the only way to do that is to install the operating system in EFI mode.

To install W10 in EFI mode, you boot from the EFI USB boot source.

The 2 TB limit refers to PC's that can only support the MBR partition scheme, which limits bootable drives to 2 TB.

What I recommend is to make a bootable W10 UEFI installer with Rufus.

Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way

Download the 64 bit W10 ISO file with the Media creation tool.

Download Windows 10 (microsoft.com)

Use Rufus to transfer the ISO file to the USB flash drive.

Select the GPT partition table from the menu.