BIOS and UEFI As Fast As Possible

What fundamental things does a computer BIOS do, and what are the important differences between the traditional BIOS and the newer UEFI?

[thoughte]

"If you can smash it with a hammer it's hardware, but if you can only swear at it in futility, it's software" - instant like

[Spoudey]

*opens hard drive*

“Wait, you can’t smash software?”

[benwillis]

UEFI... we were calling this "Yoo-fee" at my job.

[JazzBarista]

Usually the "as fast as possible" videos are loaded with new information and I like them. This video spent way too much time explaining a traditional BIOS and barely touched on UEFI.

[the_plague]

This dude makes everything much more easy to understand, like the teacher I wish I had at school

[aeebeecee]

UEFI: Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. Thanks

[IWTBFOY]

Can you do one on the actual BIOS setttings too?

[jacksonthraves]

Man your videos are so informative, they're better than the training material we use at my work ( and I work for a large computer OEM ). Happy Holidays from one British Columbian to another and thanks for the amazing content!

[benriful]

For the harddrive stuff ... I'm sure you meant GPT vs MBR. You can actually boot on a legacy BIOS system into a GPT disk much larger than 2TB. UEFI has nothing to do with that, it's a means of having better controls over newer hardware like PCIe.

UEFI itself doesn't define the partition table on the disk. That's after the BIOS/UEFI started, once it's read the disk's first sector. Then either MBR or GPT tells it where to go to find each partition on that drive - in order to search for a bootable partition.

GPT did become more standard around the same time UEFI became standard. And older BIOS systems did have incompatibilities with it, though not newer variants. If you have a UEFI system (very likely if your computer is from within 5 years), then it can make use of both MBR and GPT drives. If your computer is an old legacy BIOS from more than 10 years ago, it might not be able to use GPT. But in between those the BIOS (even if non-UEFI or a UEFI set to legacy mode) both MBR and GPT would work fine - a bit fuzzy cut-off as the motherboard supplier needed to adjust some things to make it work.

[PrithvirajDJaguar]

Techquikie is a very good channel. I know most of the things they show, but still I love to watch their videos because of 2 reasons : 1. There can be something which I might not know, on every topic. 2. Linus hosts in these videos. I love Linus <3 :D

[robertwilliams]

I don't care what anyone says, I'm going to still call the UEFI the BIOS. I've been saying for over 10 years, not stopping now.

[psp]

remember when we had to use ribbon cables and place the pins behind our hard drives

[Baneslayer]

Thank you for making these videos. Very helpful! Keep it up!

[dontonipz]

If you remember the jumpers and master slave on mb and hdd then you hade a pretty fun childhood :D

[Ferro_Giconi]

The blue screen days of bios were the good days. They all had quick and easy controls where I could mash the correct keys in the correct order very quickly to browse through every setting in no time at all. Then came the fancy animated graphic BIOS. Many things now require extra keyboard key presses, take longer to respond, or in one very odd case I found, actually required a mouse to access some settings.
I'd be enthralled if I could have those old blue BIOS screens back. I hate it when "upgrades" are actually downgrades that make something slower and/or more clunky for no good reason.

[jovanjanevski]

I'm too poor to afford a bios on my raspberry pi.

[morgansearle]

'Loads of storage, we're talking millions of Petabytes here!'

Can't wait to come back to this in a few years, and get the 'OMG A 256MB FLASH DRIVE?!!?!' feeling.

[network_king]

Some add on cards can also have their own BIOS. Generally the motherboard BIOS goes first all goes well it scans expansion slots for BIOS and executes those. Generally cards with their own BIOS are related to storage controllers like SATA controllers, SCSI cards, or some form of hardware RAID.

[alvierahman]

I pronounce uefi by just saying the letters

[Gigabyte-huyh]

3:40 there was the little known American Megatrends "Win BIOS" from the early 90's that had a gui resembling windows 3.1 and had mouse support. later versions of that bios had animations but were very limited.
(edit)
i think some IBM PS/2 Systems had a gui bios aswell