still a blue screen of death

I have been busy the last few weeks researching the possibility of changing over to using gpt partitions for creating multiboot layouts. One of the advantages of this schema is that we don’t have to worry about extended partitions. On mbr drives there was a limit of only four primary partitions with the option of typing one of those partitions extended and then creating an arbitrary number of logical partitions.

As you can see in the figure there is no extended partiton in the layout and each one is a primary partition. In fact, one can create up to 128 primary partitions on a gpt disk. Linux can be installed on gpt disks easily, but Windows requires the motherboard have a uefi (Unified EFI) firmware instead of a traditional bios firmware. There are two labs with uefi computers in which this setup is a possibility. However, there is a way to transform a bios computer to use uefi — something already practiced in Hackintoshing, which could allow all our labs to use the same partitioning scheme.

There is one issue that needs to be solved (which will be one of my summer research projects) and that is image deployment.