Perhaps this topic got off on the wrong foot, although I prefer to think of it as a misunderstanding. At this point I was about ready to just forget about this DUET thing and move on. But I don't give up so easily, and, DUET or not, I wasn't about to let this topic die without at least clarifying a few things. So..........
What you guys see as agressiveness, actually isn't. I just felt that Wonko was asking an unnecessary question, which was, in a nutshell, that he had asked to me explain the benefits of GPT. I took that as him asking me as a way to try to get an insight into why I'm pursuing this, i.e. questioning my motivations. In tech forums, motivations generally don't matter, it is the knowledge that matters, and those 2 things are entirely separate from each other. Knowledge is one thing, what one does with that knowledge is his own business. And I clearly have no unethical motivations here (or at least it should be fairly obvious, anyway).
2nd, as of his first post, I felt really had no intention of advising how I could accomplish a DUET setup, but rather that he was really only planning to ask questions and try to convince/explain to me why I shouldn't bother going about this. I already have my mind made up, help or no help, and I'm of the opinion that an individual really has no business posting in a topic if he has no useful info to contribute right from the get-go, without questioning or trying to convince otherwise, etc. If there is nothing that can be contributed, then it's best to refrain from posting in the topic at all.
To give you a better oversight of how I think, it goes something like this:
1. Person A asks question
2. Person B comes along, know's the answer to A's question, or possesses other info that can at least help bring about a solution. If on the other hand B has no relevant info or has other intentions, etc, then it's best for him/her to not post at all.
Things really are that simple to me, I'm a straightforward, no-BS type of guy, and I have no patience for runarounds and beating around the bush with people. I tend to get annoyed by others very easily, and prefer not to deal with them at all if it can be avoided.
@ Wonko: You can look at going beyond the 2.2TB limit as a need rather than a benefit, in this world everything is a matter of perspective. HDDs/storage are getting ever bigger these days, so in reality being able to use disks larger than 2.2TB really is a benefit. You have a very strange definition of "senseless feature".
@ Milind: I'm well aware that UEFI is a firmware interface, in much the same way that BIOS is a firmware interface of sorts, albeit much older. I also understand UEFI is probably largely useless in hardware such as mine, which doesn't natively support it. I'm not concerned about losing benefits, I really have nothing to lose, and knowledge to gain.
So, I'll go ahead and give you and Wonko a roundabout explanation of why I'm doing this. As of a few months ago, I had always booted all OSes in BIOS/MBR mode. But then I made the jump to UEFI, after reading up on the benefits of UEFI and GPT and clearing up a few misconceptions I had (such as, Secure Boot and UEFI are one and the same, they obviously arent, but I didnt understand this until recently. I had numerous issues dualbooting with Linux as a result of this, and viewed SB as a PITA to be avoided at all costs). But anyways, long story short, my old PC grew legs and walked away, so now I'm temporarily stuck with older hardware until I can buy something much better.
I also like to learn, and I'm determined to continue using UEFI or some form of it on my current hardware, even if it's only emulated, for the purpose of getting hands-on experience and understanding it better. And of course there are practical benefits to booting OSes on GPT, I would rather go about it the officially supported way of installing Windows (GPT on UEFI) rather than the methods outlined in your thread (GPT on BIOS). So this is really more of a pet project and a personal interest more than anything. It's certainly not absolutely necessary to pursue, I could always settle for booting Windows on BIOS/MBR, with the 4 partition limit thing. And I also understand that DUET isn't even guaranteed to work. But I do have an Intel i7 CPU and presumably a motherboard that might work with DUET, so I'd like to give it a shot anyways. I have read that AMD generally doesn't work well with DUET, if at all, if that were the case for me I wouldn't bother.
Well, hopefully I was able to clear some things up now.