Hello guyz, I own a Dell Inspiron 5521. I manually installed a Samsung 840 256 Pro SDD and the system runs fine (the last 8 months) with Windows 8 Core + Legacy Boot. I am interesting to enable the UEFI Boot mode (just for the faster boot). I did a little bit of google searching and I found some info about enabling UEFI. Some guys say that GPT format is mandatory for enabling UEFI. Some other guys say that UEFI is not related with the partition table of the disk and it can work nice and cool with MBR. I do not want to stick with GPT partition table because it's not clear if we can use it with SSD yet. (Some magician features are broken,possible Data failures,etc). So is there a way to use MBR Partition table on my SSD and UEFI Boot Option??? I wll use Windows 8.1 Pro Clean installation.
Short answer, no. You need to format in GPT style to utilize UEFI boot under Windows. There is no problem for using GPT in SSD.
Thanks for the info, Here is a link that make the SSD+GPT thing confusing, forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2228064 Last Post says that the new samsung magician supports GPT. So now worries.
On a laptop you're only going to speed up the boot by maybe 10-15 seconds (if that much) by going to UEFI. Seems like a lot of work to pick up 10 seconds?
when booting Surface2pro up and shut it down entirely again, it takes less that 15 sec by ignoring the time it takes to hit some buttons on the screen. I take this as reference for perfect work done
Actually isn't needed to format entire Partition table. You can convert MBR to GPT using AOMEI Partition Assistant. Before you can format is needed to delete System partition. Then in another working system create bootable USB/CD with AOMEI, boot from it and convert from MBR to GPT. Then, reinstall OS. Looks simple.
You can use the program called gptgen to convert your existing install. I'm sorry I don't have a link. It's actually much easier to do a fresh install using UEFI boot; which will auto-convert the system drive to GPT partition. Then you wouldn't need to actually do much work.