ZX81 Posted January 20, 2006 Share Posted January 20, 2006 (edited) Is it possible to have a second hard disk in the new notebook, where the slot drive is? That would get around the external drive hassle I have a 2nd one in a caddy in my DVD bay on my dell 9300, and I have OSx10.4.1 there I love the operating system, but price for price the dell dual core has it beat on hardware, I am talking ram and video and upgradeability; 2gb ram and 7800gtx is superb. If it gets hacked then 10.4.4 hacked successfully to dell 9400 on 2nd drive would be the route I will take, next laptop Pity about not supporting MS on Mac so far, think that would hav pulled in more consumers, cheap dell/premium apple hardware notwithstanding Edited January 20, 2006 by ZX81 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pawel_lasek Posted January 20, 2006 Share Posted January 20, 2006 (edited) It's not about making Windows unsupported - M$ talks about switching to EFI for at least four years now, but with Longhorn (now Vista) being delayed, they propably couldn't talk hardware manufacturers to it. Now Apple goes the "good way" (although EFI is a little over-bloated i think) and decides to not use PC-like BIOS at all (Atari 800 (an 8-bit micro) had better BIOS ;P) and use EFI. As for Windows support for EFI - you don't need PC-BIOS to boot Windows NT (NT disables BIOS at start, just like Linux). The only think you need is EFI-enabled ntldr along with EFI hal.dll and drivers. In fact, Windows NT 5.0 was one of the first OS'es to support EFI - however, the only released EFI-bootable version is for IA-64. (Incomplete) list of OS that support EFI and architectures: Linux: ia32 (x86), ia64, propably amd64 (need to check) Windows NT >5.0: IA-64, (not released, offically planned for Vista) x86 and amd64 *BSD: at least on ia64, don't know about other OpenVMS: IA-64 HP-UX: IA-64 Legend: IA-64 != amd64/emt64t - it's a completely different architecture, and the EFI-supported one is not everything (I'm not sure whether Altix uses EFI) And for booting Vista on EFI: You propably won't be using "set your BIOS to boot..." sequence, IIRC EFI has zero knowledge of bootable CD's. I think it goes similar to ARC boot procedure for NT4, where you go to System Console, then to CD-ROM and you find install.efi or sthg alike :> In fact, it should be possible to launch it that way (with Intel Reference Impl.): Go to EFI Bootmanager select Boot option maintenance menu select "add boot option" Legacy boot (or sthg similar), if not, choose a volume and appopriate loader file (should have .efi extension) just my speculation UPDATE: Intel Reference Implementations contains images allowing EFI to boot "normal" PC OS'es going to check it Edited January 20, 2006 by pawel_lasek Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R. Bear Helms Posted February 5, 2006 Share Posted February 5, 2006 There's always a lag between a new partitioning scheme being made and someone's coding a way of manipulating it, or just adhering to its standards. We need not only to EFI boot another volume, but a boot manager which asks you which compliant volume you want to boot, and in the case of Windows, somehow put in place a BIOS like what would satisfy XP to load and run stably and well. I think the source code to the EFI used on the Core Duo Macs really needs to be examined - without this being disclosed, and without reverse engineering it (which is against EULA), someone will have to sit down to some sample code from Intel for EFI and make intelligent guesses as to how to achieve Mac/XP boot menuing. It's not clear at all to me whether EFI is allowed to exist in several flavors on one volume. How would the firmware loader select which one to use? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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