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No EFI Support for Vista
DietFluffy writes "Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI."
For those of us who DON'T have a BN acronyms in a LUT in our heads, EFI means "Extensible Firmware Interface". Read up on Wiki.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
The parent may have been moderated as "troll", but its TRUE, and annoying. I have signed up for the Vista beta testing program, and was quite pissed off to find out that they STILL arent supporting my SATA controller (SiI-3112 non-RAID configuration). We where hoping for support of the more common controllers back with Windows XP SP2. Here it is a few YEARS later, and I cant even install the latest Vista beta.
How about you read up about it before just dismissing it out of handI nterface
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_
OS independant device drivers sounds like a big plus to me. No more complaints about how your ATI card runs like crap under linux.
I used to leave a 150 MB FAT16 partition on my HD to store data for flashing the BIOS etc. I'm not sure if I could have booted from it, though I probably could have. Instead I just put the new BIOS image there and booted from a standard DOS boot CD and accessed the FAT16 partition within DOS. Worked fine. Alternatively you can just write a new CD with the right image, obviously, with the downside that you can't easily backup the current image. Finally, these days I'd just boot from a USB memory stick, which is the spiritual heir of the floppy in any event. Oh and you can flash the BIOS from within Windows, although that gives me the creeps, too.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Amit Singh and his friends at IBM got XP running under VMWare in Linux on an Intel iMac. As he says, "To anybody who has used Windows XP under Virtual PC on the PowerPC version of Mac OS X: you will simply be blown away by how fast Windows XP runs under VMware on the new hardware." So that's good news. Now someone just has to make it work under OS X directly.
I once thought I could get away without 3.5 floppies anymore. I was wrong. Something always drags you back in the end. Flashing BIOS for instance.
You can flash your bios using a bootable cdrom without a problem.
I've been living quite happily without a floppy for 2+ years.
My pics.
If you read an article about the PC boot process (been on /. long time ago), you'd see the drudgery of climbing up the ladder of legacies to bootstrap a PC with BIOS.
Even if you have two dual-core Athlons 64, you start with a single CPU in 286-compatiblity mode. You need to climb all the way up, starting with ancient 8-bit instructions to enable 16-bit, get out of the 640K memory limitations, floating math co-processor, pull all the hardware from legacy compatiblity modes (all gfx cards by default start in CGA mode, year 1981) enable all extras that were not supported by 486 and similar, and slowly, slowly crawl your way up to a level where a dual 64-bit CPU is a dual 64-bit CPU, not a hyper-overclocked 386.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
What you describe is an optional module for EFI already.
Apple just chose not to include it, for the obvious reason that they don't need it.
I expect standard bootloaders in the free software world will all support EFI by the end of this year, if they don't already. I don't know if you'd need an EFI-specific live-CD / install CD too for CD installs.
I for one was counting on the rumors that my new mac mini would be able to run windows. Why? Games. Although it'll take more than just EFI to play games in M$ Windows on an intel mac (drivers etc.), EFI is an important step towards that goal.
You're obviously not a Windows user, nor a gamer, since the ONLY use of Windows is to play games anyway. Maybe view pr0n as well, but you can do that better on a Mac already...
Soory, but will not be a bad idea if you read an 80386 users' manual...
286 processors and up start in what is know as real-mode. like the original 8086. That is the 16 bit mode.
There is not 8 bit mode (not any more, and I think that was only available in the nec v20 AFAIK).
VGA cards do not start-up in CGA mode. They are initialized by the VGA BIOS in text mode, compatible to CGA but is not the same because 480 vertical lines (plus retrace) are used instead of 200 plus retrace.
BTW, newer graphic cards don't even support all C/E/VGA modes anymore, and I think that has benn for almost for 8 years more or less.
I don't think that the setup of the protected mode should be done in BIOS, but some useful mode (better than the crappy real-mode) should be enabled.
May be some flat mode (32 or 64 bits).
On the other hand, you don't enable more than protected mode, the "features" are always available (but maybe just in protected mode the instruction don't produce illegal opcode... I don't know that.)
BTW, does anyone know where the "shocked-SHOCKED!" thing ( not necessarily with my capitalisation ) came from?
Casablanca. (1942)
RENAULT (Claude Rains): I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
The croupier comes out of the gambling room and up to Renault.
CROUPIER: (handing Renault a roll of bills) Your winnings, sir.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is no need to by RAM from Apple. When I bought by G4 Powerbook, and RAM-Upgrade from Apple would have cost me 800 Eur or so - instead I bought two Kingston 1GB SO-DIMM modules for 140 Eur each (at that time) and they work just fine.
This is ridiculous! The story is, the crippled (I am amazed they are even releasing it) 32-bit version of Vista won't support the odd mac-only combination of 32-bit chips, and EFI. The 64-bit version of Vista, will support the standard configuration of 64-bit chips, and EFI, just like XP 64 already does.
I love all the comments about how far behind Apple MS is, as proven by the fact that they can't even get EFI working. No, they have it working, just on modern 64-bit systems. Apple is the only company on earth that decided to go with a brand new technology like EFI, and then stick 32-bit chips on a 32-bit OS in their system! If Apple actually comes out with a 64-bit machine (like most modern PCs), I'm sure 64-bit Vista will boot on it just fine. This is one of those cases where the problem isn't how far behind MS is on their support for EFI, but how far behind Apple is on their choice of x86 chips. I have no idea why Apple let itself get talked into dumping a 64-bit architecture, just to get what basically amounts to some fast dual-core P3s, but they did.
Talk about the very definition of FUD!
I hope you weren't implying that Wine is an emulator because Wine Is Not an Emulator. ;)
Join Tor today!
Ive flashed my bios on both Asus boards in my house from windows without a hitch. It was actually quite easy
1. Run Program
2. It automagicly Downloads what's needed
3. Click Okay
4. Wait 10 seconds
5. Profit !!! ???
One of the asus boards was a P2B Slot1 (PII 350 100MHz Bus) and a A8V 939 (Athlon64 3000+ @ 200MHz FSB) and ive seen not an issue. Windows won't magicly crash during those 10 seconds and I doubt it really will or else asus won't let you flash from windows.
You guys really gots to get out of the "Windows is unstable" crap. This isn't Windows 98 ive seen desktop XP systems get months and months of uptime without any problems.
For fun I decided to run windows vista and it seems to already be using EFI because it makes a "Boot" directory in both Windows Drives (XP MCE and Vista) and an "EFI" directory containing fonts. So there going to remove the feature from the beta ??
Solosoft
Solosoft.org - Your Online Resource to Nothing
Windows supports EFI. Here, now, today. Has been for years. Currently is. Except only on the IA64 architecture. This makes the article partly bullshit, and a large amount of comments here as well. But the bullshit doesn't stop here.
Of course the thing about drivers being stored entirely in EFI is completely false, misleading and somewhat retarded (it really depends on how twisted your idea of drivers is. If you come from a Linux background there's a 9 in 10 chance you are clueless and forever jaded about it). Of course the DRM comments here don't make the slightest sense, since TPM chips are here, now, have been for years, and they work with the old, usual, actually-existing BIOS extensibility interface (i.e.: drop a function pointer somewhere, get called). Have you bought an IBM laptop or workstation that was made some time after the Cretacean? congratulations! your cute little black box is Trusted Computing compliant (r), (c) and (TM)!
From a more technical point of view: Windows doesn't depend on legacy hardware. It used to, in ye olden days (until before Windows Server 2003 R1), but it was so easy to get around it with software emulators (provided by Microsoft herself, as part of Windows NT 4 Embedded, Server Appliance Kit for Windows 2000 Server, et cetera) that only people with a really small penis complained. Nowadays it's a matter of the right boot loader and Hardware Abstraction Layer (all aboard the cluetraaain! if you are among the differently-endowed mouth breathers who confuse "instruction set" with "hardware" - and you know if you are one - this might just be your chance to finally get it!).
Technical trivia: the Windows boot loader is a beauty. It totally mops the floor with anything in the wild, save maybe for Grub. The horrid ntldr flat executable is just a teeny weeny stub containing the real thing, a PE executable called osloader.exe (with a resource section, even - the description simply says "Boot loader"; sadly it has no icon) which is the universal loader - why, yes, your humble peecee can network-boot too! In short, the little bugger comes with a full SCSI+ATAPI stack (it can even stay loaded and be used by the kernel as the SCSI class driver - no shit!), a network stack for the TFTP client (yep) and its very own hardware abstraction layer, since the thing was written against ARC (think EFI, only for the Alpha AXP architecture) which is only really available on Alpha. The thing is a driver model short of a full operating system
So, reconsider the length of your penis in the light of these new facts
Make a difference - use Windows! (open source clone of Windows NT)
Yawn. It seems no problem for most LiveCD Linux distros. So Microsoft solution is just brain-dead.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The problem with this idea, is that the MB manufacturers would have to license EFI from Intel. Intel developed EFI, and at present is the only one using EFI. So, the only way you end up with EFI right now is if you have an Intel MB. As far as all the MB manufacturers are concerned, EFI adds nothing substantial of value to a desktop machine, so why pay a competitor like Intel to license their technology, when Award makes a fine BIOS that does everything a desktop user would need, and then some?
If it weren't for macheads wanting to install Vista on their machines, this wouldn't even be a news story. Intel is more than capable of writing the code Vista needs to boot in whatever way Intel wants it to. If Intel had convinced any OEM but Apple to go EFI with 32-bit chips, then Intel would just hand over the code to MS, and the whole problem would be solved. Besides, every EFI MB out there has a BIOS compatibility mode, which Apple decided they didn't need. This truly is a lot of FUD that only effects Apple. The issue here is that MS doesn't want to put in extra work just to get Vista to boot on a Mac, Intel apparently doesn't either (or has been asked not to by Apple) and Apple sure as hell doesn't want to, which is the whole reason they went with EFI without a compatibility mode to begin with. Right now, EFI only exists in some 64-bit systems, and Macs. I guarantee you, that if tomorrow Intel talked Dell into going EFI with 32-bit CPUs, Vista would support it in whatever configuration Dell needed.
In the most recent Vista beta you can install the drivers from floppy, USB or CD.
XP already supports EFI booting
No XP doesn't support EFI booting, Windows 2003 64 bit does at this time. The Gateway system has EFI _with_ legacy BIOS support allowing XP to boot on it.