During a bare-metal installation of Windows Server 2022 on a new rack server, Setup shows only 2 TB of a 4 TB SAS drive as available for the system volume and leaves the rest of the space unusable. The server is shipped with legacy BIOS firmware enabled by default, but it also supports UEFI mode. You must be able to boot from this same 4 TB disk and make its full capacity available to the operating system. Which preparatory action will achieve this goal before rerunning the installation?
Create the system volume as a dynamic MBR disk during Setup and extend it past 2 TB once Windows is running.
Keep the firmware in BIOS mode and re-format the partition as ReFS after installation to unlock the extra space.
Change the server firmware to UEFI mode and initialize the drive with a GPT partition table before starting Windows Setup.
Enable NTFS compression during installation so the 4 TB drive can be addressed as a single 2 TB-equivalent partition.
MBR-partitioned disks that boot from legacy BIOS firmware are limited to addressing about 2 TB. Converting the disk to the GUID Partition Table (GPT) removes that size ceiling, but Windows can only boot from a GPT disk when the server firmware is set to UEFI mode. Switching the firmware to UEFI and initializing the disk as GPT therefore lets Windows Server use and boot from the entire 4 TB drive.
ReFS formatting, dynamic disks, or NTFS compression do not bypass the 2 TB barrier imposed by an MBR boot disk, so they would still leave part of the drive inaccessible or unbootable.
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