Semi-OT: Vista will NOT boot on Intel Macs
- From: Helpful Harry <helpful_harry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:47:36 +1300
From APCMag.com ...
Microsoft bombshell: no EFI support for Vista
---------------------------------------------
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.
Speaking at Intel Developer Forum San Francisco,
Microsoft development manager, Andrew Ritz, also
revealed that there will never be any support for
booting Windows via EFI on systems with 32-bit
processors.
Although Microsoft has previously said EFI booting
would be supported by Vista, Ritz admitted that EFI
support won't be seen in any version of Windows until
the release of Longhorn Server.
It will not be available in the release version of
Windows Vista later this year Microsoft says people
will have to wait for an unspecified 'subsequent
release of Windows client'. Ritz could not say whether
that would be a service pack update to Vista or the
next-generation of Windows.
Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the modern and
flexible successor to the 20-year-old PC BIOS. It is
responsible for initialising hardware in the PC, and
importantly, device drivers are stored in the EFI
flash memory rather than being loaded by the operating
system. It is a major change for the PC industry and
both PC makers and Microsoft have been slow to make
the switch. Because the Apple Intel Mac platform is
entirely new, it does not have any legacy support
concerns. It was hoped that 2006 would be the year PC
makers would make the switch. Microsoft's lack of
Windows support is a huge blow to Intel's hopes, and
removes most of the incentive for PC makers to
implement it in the short term.
That's terrible news for Intel Mac users who have
been hoping that they could dual-boot Windows and Mac
OS X on their new Macs: not only are their processors
not 64-bit (and thus will never be supported by
Windows EFI booting) but Windows Vista won't boot on
EFI anyway.
It said its decision to 'reprioritise' EFI development
to the server version of Windows was based on a lack
of available desktop PCs with EFI support on the market.
"A combination of factors changed our plans. The big
one, in my opinion was platform availability. With this
huge move to 64-bit based platforms and for us to
support it, we needed to see a large heterogeneous
sample of 64 bit implementations out there for us to
feel comfortable in supporting it." said Ritz.
"heterogeneous sample"?!?!? I guess that translates as "we couldn't get
it to work". ;o)
Helpful Harry
Hopefully helping harassed humans happily handle handiwork hardships ;o)
.
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