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Why Aren't We Dual Booting Yet?

Swad

By Swad

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Since we started our much-anticipated Mac forum last week, it’s gotten a lot of use, especially on the topic of dual booting the Intel Macs. A few ideas have been thrown out which makes us ask the question… why aren’t we there yet?

 

This thread poses an excellent question – if Gateway has been selling PCs with EFI-based Windows XP, why can’t we do the same with the Macintels? According to a news.com article from December 2003,

The first EFI computer, a Gateway PC, went on sale in November. Others are expected to appear in 2004, with ever greater numbers coming in the following years. But not everyone is jumping on the EFI bandwagon. […]Gateway, which uses EFI in its all-in-one Gateway 610 Media Center desktop, said it chose to do so because EFI proved a more efficient way to code preboot software and can also help to improve the product from a long-term development perspective, a company representative said.

Does anyone have this computer or one similar? If we could check out what makes these EFI XP machines tick, we would probably be a lot closer to getting a dual boot environment going.

 

Another thread discusses the prospect of using both EFI and BIOS on the same motherboard. If we can’t figure out how Gateway did it, this may be the second best route.

 

Have you come up with anything we’re missing?

 

And of course, how could you miss this contest which intends to pay 10,000 to the first person who successfully dual boots. My question – since a lot of the work on this subject is being done on our community forum… what happens if multiple people put the pieces together? Food for thought.

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R. Bear Helms

I am not even that clear on the concept of EFI and how it is implemented. I assume it's sort of like BIOS, but instead of being burned into chips on a motherboard, it too is bootstrapped in and executed.

 

Is this correct? If so, how can we possibly expect an EFI meant for Macs to work as-is on any other platform?

 

Something else that bugs me is the EFI image must be bootstrapped by some loader, therefore what we have is more-or-less unchanging code burned into chips on the motherboard that get the EFI up and running.

 

I think one of the more universal solutions here is to re-engineer this EFI bootloader so it can get the EFI image off various hard disk partitions, or even allocate an entire track (or more) of the boot hard drive to EFI images necessary for various OSes.

 

Any after-the-boot OS changer is going to have to do a lot of unstandardized EFI image changing, which can and probably will break every time Apple updates the EFI for OS X, to say nothing of Windows Vista.

 

We know Windows XP is stable with BIOS images that date back to the 20th century, so a machine that can be booted to either EFI or legacy BIOS would be a solution to this dual booting problem.

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crazymonkeypants
I am not even that clear on the concept of EFI and how it is implemented. I assume it's sort of like BIOS, but instead of being burned into chips on a motherboard, it too is bootstrapped in and executed.

 

Is this correct?

 

No.

 

If you're interested, you should do some reading on the subject. Intel's EFI site is quite informative.

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R. Bear Helms

I think the Intel site confused me more.

 

What jist I seemed to get off their explanation (I didn't read the technical papers) is that EFI allows a manufacturer to put a post-boot process inbetween the loader and the actual loading and running of the Operating System.

 

Therefore, if BIOS cannot handle an exarbyte (1000 terabytes?) of storage, EFI can extend or replace BIOS functions as desired. You can swap out any or all of a BIOS, simply reading what (if any) configuration data you want.

 

Doesn't this also mean EFI can contain a validation process to make sure an OS will not be loaded if the hardware environment is wrong in some way?

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Vipersfate

What exactly is EFI? I know it's not a BIOS, but would systems that use a BIOS be able to run Operating Systems that require EFI? If so, as mentioned above, an image of EFI to run on BIOS based system would be nice. Also, is there a version of the new Mac OSX for Intel based systems yet (Not the macs)?

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