milindsmart

Hi, Well first of all, I wrote that post (check nick) Regarding the USB, it could be any other disk, including another HDD. The major point in favour of using a small MBR disk is that it allows you to keep all your big disks in GPT, which actually need them. It doesn't matter for reliability, or flexibility when your 2GB drive is either MBR or GPT. It does matter for your 1TB Hard Disk because of the number of partitions and the amount of data that is at stake. But I get your point about the floppy thing, another chap also made the comparison I know about DUET/Clover, but then you'll be lying to your OS that the firmware is UEFI, which is unnecessary. One reason that DUET is not ideal is that it doesn't work on all computers, according to http://www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/ . If Clover is solid and works well across different machines, that's nice too, and perhaps someone should port back some changes to the DUET project. We have multiple other single-disk solutions, which are basically using a tiny disk image of bootmgr and bcd. You can use this image from either Grub, Grub4Dos, or Syslinux. You needn't actually have an image, you can dynamically generate it on the spot too. The main development is actually happening on another site. A list of important posts with the actual methods is here : http://reboot.pro/topic/19516-hack-bootmgr-to-boot-windows-in-bios-to-gpt/page-5?do=findComment&comment=187175 . You can read the thread too to get an idea of the possibilities. You must ultimately recognize that all current solutions are trying to work around Microsoft's restriction on using UEFI only to boot from GPT disks. So if you have only BIOS, you either pretend that the firmware is UEFI, so Windows agrees to boot from GPT. This is what DUET/Clover does. pretend that the disk is MBR, so Windows agrees to boot from it in BIOS, not realizing that it's also a GPT device. This is what the Hybrid MBR from bootcamp does. This solution is a modification of (2) in the sense that the disk pretends to be MBR only at boot time. After starting the boot Windows knows that the disk is GPT and is fine with it. I have a much cleaner solution under development though, more on that once I have something real.