BIOS versus UEFI: are you using 1982 software?

[JosephArgenio]

This is more in the Linux vein, but could apply to Windows I would think.  This is not an ongoing problem as we are returning these Gen8 servers for Gen9, so this is more of a rant and hopefully a warning to others.
You could be using software from 1982 without knowing it. That's right, in the firmware of most PC hardware.
We recently developed a replication and rollout process for our linux workstations (desktop and rack servers) which worked for Lenovo P300 but failed mysteriously for the "HP ProLiant DL320e Gen8 v2 Server". The error involved a GPT (versus the MBR that was created for us on the HP server). You can look up these terms on the internet, but I can tell you briefly that the "Master Boot Record" technology dates from the early 80s and is implemented by BIOS firmware, while "GUID Partition Table" is more modern and associated with the newer UEFI firmware standard. Actually, there are even later firmware standards which are open-source.
We just obtained Lenovo P310 that has both but defaults to BIOS. The HP only had BIOS. Not sure how hard they would be to flash, but we sent them back for Gen 9 servers. One limitation of BIOS is a 2T max hard drive, there are kludge workarounds to this as with most limits.
It was almost funny: investigating, I went into the BIOS. Then I called over a few people to try and guess what I had on the screen: TRS-80, Commodore-65, IBM-XT and so forth from the older guys. The young guys were miffed. So am I. Why would a computer company sell this garbage?

[Torsten.]

HP is selling servers with (U)EFI for more than 15 years now ... I can't see the 'killer' feature in GPT - who needs boot partitions lager than 2 TB?

[Jimmy Vance]

The 2TB limit is for a boot drive. I have several 25 drive DL380 Gen8 systems with 19TB of storage configured in one lun and Linux has no issue accessing it. Required no kludge workaround to make it work.