It is my understanding that those machines with a 2.0 port can boot to UEFI. One side is a USB 3.0 port and the other is a USB 2.0 port.
If you boot OS installation media in UEFI mode, even if the flash drive is set up as MBR, the OS will still install itself in UEFI mode and set up the internal disk as GPT.įrom what I have read (after extensive research) this happens when you have an earlier XPS. That's how I'm able to have flash drives that support both Legacy and UEFI mode, even when Secure Boot is enabled in the latter case which means UEFI is the only available boot mechanism on the system. UEFI usually boots from GPT disks, but it can also boot from MBR disks. Legacy BIOS can only boot from MBR disks. The two boot mechanisms are Legacy BIOS and UEFI. The two partition schemes are MBR and GPT. MBR is a partition layout scheme, not a boot mechanism. You can make sure you always boot in UEFI mode by enabling Secure Boot in your BIOS, which disables Legacy booting. Yes you need to boot in UEFI to install in UEFI, but again it is possible to boot in UEFI mode from an MBR flash drive. Most USB drives that can boot EFI can probably also boot MBR but then any subsequent installation would be MBR. My understanding is that it is necessary to boot UEFI in order to install UEFI. I'm pretty sure that I could boot from the left ports with 1.5.1.ĭidn't try MBR booting. My 9370 with 1.6.3 BIOS I can boot (UEFI) from the right side USB port.