Win7 x64 booting natively via EFI (no BIOS emulation)

ah- · Jan 22, 2014

asten said:
Dear Professionals,

First of all thank you for the excellent work and informative posts in this forum/thread; using your information, i was able to come quite far in my efi booting endeavour, but i am not completely there yet. Now i ask you to help me out and/or clarify things for me;
...

Have you tried deleting the Intel driver? That should hopefully be enough.

And congratuations psyq321, that's really cool stuff! I don't have access to my laptop until Monday to test it out, but that sounds very good!

Do you know if it's maybe possible to execute code early on resume so the Intel unloading isn't necessary anymore?

And yeah the Broadcom Wifi might really be related to apple_set_os, maybe it's really necessary to just patch out the GPU disabling and leave the rest as it is.

psyq321 · Jan 23, 2014

@V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r,

So far so good - I have not got any BSOD while using Iris Pro only.

However, the battery life extension is not spectacular - I get approx. 30 mins more when using Intel-only. Basically, the power draw is reduced to ~17-18W compared to 18W-20W on NVIDIA.

But this is still >a lot< and I suspect that lack of selective USB suspend of Apple USB peripherals (SD Card reader, keyboard, trackpad and sensors) is contributing to this. Unfortunately, I do not think we can do anything about this other than rewriting the drivers from the scratch and guessing how to enable USB selective suspend which is not something trivial I'd say.

In addition, I have a strong reason to suspect that Bluetooth and WiFi radios are constantly ON on Windows, even when not used. The reason I suspect this is the following: I managed to make WiFi card disappear from Windows Device manager while playing with the gmux registers. I do not know what I did exactly yet, and if the disappearance was a side effect of something else, but it can be that radios are also controlled in a similar way. One of these days I'll disassemble Apple drivers and see what exactly are they doing.

@ah-,

I added code in my proof of concept driver which asks Windows kernel to inform it when system power state changes. Upon resume, I try to re-enable Intel GPU and switch GMUX to it.

Unfortunately, this did not work (screen was still black). At first I thought I am not doing something right but then I connected over SSH and noticed that even executing the switch manually from the console did not power on the display.

The only way that reliably powers the display on after system resume was to disable Intel driver (which enables Microsoft VGA) and then re-enable it.

I suppose it has something to do with EDID readout and Intel driver behavior... I'll see if this can be fixed.

asten · Jan 23, 2014

Black Screen upon Boot

ah- said:
Have you tried deleting the Intel driver? That should hopefully be enough.

Greetings and Thank you for your answer!
As i have disabled the internal (vendor id 8086) graphcis card i had hoped this would be enough - its not even properly recognized on my system (microsoft basic display adapter) - but i will try to uninstall via software panel and try again; is there anything else I should try or do?
In other words - is putting the install.wim from windows on the partiton, configuring efi boot and then setting the correct registers for the dedicated graphics card all that needs to be done? I read somewhere something about having to load the graphics card firmware etc? Is this neccessary?

Thank you for your help!

- Christian

asten · Jan 23, 2014

Black Screen still Persists

Greetings!

ah- said:
Have you tried deleting the Intel driver? That should hopefully be enough.

@ah-: I tried deleting the integrated gfx card driver; i have no %windir%\System32\drivers\igdkmd64.sys file on my windows hdd; i tried deleting the basicdisplay.sys file in the smae directory but it did not work as well; please note that my system actually boots and is usable as long as i do not set the VGAE Register and set the register on my PCI Bridge (ie

mm 01000004 7 -PCI
mm 0001003E 8 -PCI

.
Only if i do set those commands in my efi shell do i get the black screen; i have installed the latest Nvidia display drivers (but no intel drivers).
I want to be able to use 3d acceleration so i want my nvidia card to be fully recognized.
Is there anything else i have missed or has anyone any more suggestions for me? Please help me if you can, i do not know what else to try..

Thank you!

- Christian

tramtam · Jan 25, 2014

asten said:
Greetings!

@ah-: I tried deleting the integrated gfx card driver; i have no %windir%\System32\drivers\igdkmd64.sys file on my windows hdd; i tried deleting the basicdisplay.sys file in the smae directory but it did not work as well; please note that my system actually boots and is usable as long as i do not set the VGAE Register and set the register on my PCI Bridge (ie

mm 01000004 7 -PCI

mm 0001003E 8 -PCI

.
Only if i do set those commands in my efi shell do i get the black screen; i have installed the latest Nvidia display drivers (but no intel drivers).
I want to be able to use 3d acceleration so i want my nvidia card to be fully recognized.
Is there anything else i have missed or has anyone any more suggestions for me? Please help me if you can, i do not know what else to try..

Thank you!

- Christian

Hi Christian

I'm in the exact same boat as you are (MBP 6,2, trying to get nVidia card working in 8.1 and getting the same results with registers, ie black screen). Please, in case you manage to get this working post a reply here. Will do the same if i succeed.

Cheers
Serge

psyq321 · Jan 30, 2014

@ah-, @V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r,

I updated the proof-of-concept gmux switch driver a bit, adding detection of the Intel Iris graphics.

Basically, now the driver will not do anything unless it detects that the Intel Iris GPU was not hidden by the EFI. The advantage of this is that the driver can be kept on all the time, and it would only do the gmux switch if apple_set_os was called in the GRUB.

For "normal" Windows boot (where EFI hides Iris GPU) it will just stay resident and not do anything (I will change this in the future to refuse to load completely, not wasting any memory).

Download: http://www.dimkovic.com/distrib/GmuxSwitchTestWinDriver.zip

Now, some more interesting findings: I managed to get the idle power consumption on my Haswell 15" rMBP to 13.3W in Windows (!). So far, this is the lowest idle power draw I can do and Windows estimates approx. 6:30h of total battery life.

Now, to do this I had accidentaly disabled Intel Iris driver and only left Windows VGA driver. As soon as you enable Intel Iris driver, idle load goes up to approx 15W.

This is really fishy and I'd say it means Intel Iris GPU driver is not configuring power management properly, possibly due to slightly custom setup of the Apple notebook. I will investigate this further by probing what is it doing with the iGPU frequencies and other power management capabilities.

Quackers · Jan 30, 2014

Basically, now the driver will not do anything unless it detects that the Intel Iris GPU was not hidden by the EFI

I know I'm on a different Mac (rMBP 10,1) but EFI doesn't hide the Intel chip on mine. Does it on yours?
In fact that's part of the problem - I wish it did (like Bootcamp does for Windows).

Quackers · Jan 30, 2014

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro11-1/Saucy

In the above help.ubuntu page for rMBP 11,1 what exactly does this line mean, please?

"Make sure /dev/sda1 is mounted as /boot/efi (an EFI boot partition)."

Is it so mounted automatically? I'm not clear on that. I haven't used this method to install Ubuntu before, I've used refined previously.

Thanks

EDIT In answer to my own question yes it did happen automatically

Also a mid 2012 rMBP (10,1) can be added to the list for successful installs using the above page

Thanks!

Quackers · Jan 31, 2014

Damn, spoke too soon

Ubuntu boots fine through grub and OSX also boots fine after including the MacOS as the 5th item in the boot menu.
Sadly it seems to have broken my EFI Windows 8.1 install as far as booting goes

I see there's now an extra Boot folder in the EFI partition with boox64.efi in it (plus the Microsoft/Boot folder and the grub folder). I don't think I had that folder before

At the efibootmgr command I did
sudo efibootmgr -o 0,80,1
as windows was 0001 in the print out. Did I mess it up?

Windows won't even boot now from the Alt + boot menu, though it's listed there. Windows wants repairing, it says.

Any pointers would be good. Thanks.

CocaCoca · Jan 31, 2014

@ah-, @psyq321: Dear EFI Masters! Could you PLEASE share the patched grub binary for rMBP11,3. I'm very far from development, but I'm kinda expert in ThrottleStop (http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2288/throttlestop-6-00/). We can try to tune Iris Pro power management from ThrottleStop TPL window.

Quackers · Jan 31, 2014

Well they're all booting again

OSX and Windows 8.1 boot from the Alt + boot menu and Ubuntu and Windows boot directly from grub. I'll work on OSX booting from grub.

I found out what happened but not how

Everything was working and I booted back into Ubuntu and ran its updates. When I restarted Windows wouldn't boot and it said it needed repairing.
After mooching around I could find nothing wrong and fired up gdisk which promptly told me I had a hybrid MBR

Where did that come from?
I know it's a long shot but it can only have come from the Ubuntu updates. I hadn't done anything else in between.

Anyway I created a new protective MBR in gdisk and everything booted again.
Most peculiar.
C'est la vie

ah- · Jan 31, 2014

CocaCoca said:
@ah-, @psyq321: Dear EFI Masters! Could you PLEASE share the patched grub binary for rMBP11,3. I'm very far from development, but I'm kinda expert in ThrottleStop (http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2288/throttlestop-6-00/). We can try to tune Iris Pro power management from ThrottleStop TPL window.

I uploaded my grub folder here: http://andreas.heider.io/gmux/2013/grub-apple-set-os.tar.bz2

sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk0s1 /efi

Then move the folder to /efi/EFI/grub and edit the grub.cfg.

I hope this helps, the ThrottleStop thing sounds interesting.

lcastillo · Feb 1, 2014

Dear all,

Thank you everybody for your fantastic job! You are masters in EFI Hacking topic

.

I was wondering if it possible to use the featured driver by psyq321 in a 1st generation Macbook Pro Retina 15" (2.3 Ghz, HD4000, Nvidia 650M) and if you could be so kind to post a step by step guide assuming the step 0 starts with refind installed.
I offer my mbpr for testing each release of the driver if you want.

Thank you much in advanced and sorry for my English.
Best regards from Spain,
Luis.

peer.gynt · Feb 11, 2014

ah- said:
> It works perfectly fine in Linux. But in Windows most of the screen turns black soon
> after the boot, with only the mouse cursor and a blinking Wifi icon visible, no matter
> whether I boot with the Nvidia GPU or the Intel GPU (via the GfxCardStatus trick).

Hmm, I see the same happen in Linux: I can activate the IGD, and deactivate the DIS, but the screen turns and remains black. I can actually start X and it seems to run fine -- just can't see a thing on the black screen

Did you apply any additional settings (or do you happen to have a pointer to a more appropriate forum to ask about Linux on an 11,3 MBP)? Thanks!

ah- · Feb 11, 2014

peer.gynt said:
Hmm, I see the same happen in Linux: I can activate the IGD, and deactivate the DIS, but the screen turns and remains black. I can actually start X and it seems to run fine -- just can't see a thing on the black screen

Did you apply any additional settings (or do you happen to have a pointer to a more appropriate forum to ask about Linux on an 11,3 MBP)? Thanks!

Yeah, sadly the display detection with switcheroo is broken on linux, see these threads:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/1/7/343
https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/1/7/91

I'm not sure wether there's a working patch yet, you might have more luck with disabling the DIS in grub.

Shelltoe · Mar 3, 2014

lcastillo said:
Dear all,

Thank you everybody for your fantastic job! You are masters in EFI Hacking topic .

I was wondering if it possible to use the featured driver by psyq321 in a 1st generation Macbook Pro Retina 15" (2.3 Ghz, HD4000, Nvidia 650M) and if you could be so kind to post a step by step guide assuming the step 0 starts with refind installed.
I offer my mbpr for testing each release of the driver if you want.

Thank you much in advanced and sorry for my English.
Best regards from Spain,
Luis.

You can Boot into windows using your HD4000 without the driver. But we're stuck with Basic Display Drivers.

Im Using this efi-shell startup.nsh for a year now:

PHP:

echo Switch select
mm 7C2 1 ;IO :1
stall 100000
mm 7D4 1 ;IO :28

echo Switch display 
mm 7C2 1 ;IO :2
stall 100000
mm 7D4 1 ;IO :10

echo Switch DDC
mm 7C2 1 ;IO :2
stall 100000
mm 7D4 1 ;IO :40

echo Power down discrete graphics
mm 7C2 1 ;IO :1
stall 100000
mm 7D4 1 ;IO :50

mm 7C2 1 ;IO :0
stall 100000
mm 7D4 1 ;IO :50

echo Boot Windows
fs0:\EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi

e1475599 · Mar 3, 2014

Hi all,

I have Macbook Pro 15" ME294 and I'm trying to install Windows 7 in EFI mode without additional utilities aka rEFIt.

Have anyone here succeeded in this?

I removed hybrid MBR leaving protective MBR.
I tried to copy Windows 7 iso on MBR formatted flash drive - holding Option on boot I see orange icon with Windows title but clicking it it boots in BIOS mode. And it does not allow installing to GPT disk.
I tried to copy Windows 7 iso on GPT formatted flash drive - holding Option on boot I see orange icon with EFI Boot title but clicking it does nothing, Macbook gets stuck on this boot selection screen.

I'm not that concerned about everything to work yet (sound problems, dual video problems listed in this thread), I just want to launch this effing Windows 7 installer in EFI mode. And I cannot.

Does anyone have a working recipe?

nak1017 · May 7, 2014

Shelltoe said:
You can Boot into windows using your HD4000 without the driver. But we're stuck with Basic Display Drivers.

So anyone with a rMBP 10,1 is stuck with the basic graphics drivers...?

That's too bad, I was hoping the EFI work would help with my eGPU efforts

testuser0 · May 23, 2014

Hi

Hey.
I'm new on this Forum =)

I own a MacbookPro5,3 and i'm not able to install w7 or get the bootloader working.
Maybe someone has a startup.nsh for me (for my model?)

Do anyone has a prepared grub for it?
Or do d3vil released a final EFI for the VGA related stuff?

I searched in all posts and tried so much but nothing helped.
I even tried to get the duet loader on my usb stick, but if i try to boot from it my mac doesnt even recognize it as a boot-device.

The DUET iso is also not available anymore (due to dead links)

Can anyone help me please?

Edit:// A Working Link for a DUET.iso would be a start...

testuser0 · Jun 1, 2014

anyone

d3vi1 · Jun 1, 2014

testuser0 said:
anyone

I'm working hard to release a LLTD/LLMNR responder for Mac and afterwards I'm back to the EFI applications:

1) Windows boot support for MacBook Air using an EFI NTFS Driver that automatically parses boot.bcd and shows a virtual boot loader on each Windows partition that sends the command+S command+V, etc options directly to winload.efi plus companion Windows/Mac applications that tell it which VGA card is the default one and if the other one should be available, if it should also POST the VGA Option ROM, etc.

2) EFI Application for changing the Airport card locale between FCC/ETSI etc. For MacBooks that changed continent. Basically it edits the SPROM of the airport card.

and a few others. I am hoping that the LLTD/LLMNR responder is something that will be popular enough to finance my EFI work. It will make your Mac show up correctly on the Windows Network Map, icon included and generated dynamically from by Mac OS X from CoreTypes!

d3vi1 · Jun 1, 2014

testuser0 said:
The DUET iso is also not available anymore (due to dead links)

Can anyone help me please?

Edit:// A Working Link for a DUET.iso would be a start...

Actually, on your particular system, you shouldn't need DUET.iso for some weird reason as long as you slipstream the Nvidia Drivers and make it autoinstall. I know that MBP5,3 doesn't need anything. Furthermore, IIRC for MBP5,3 you should try setting the registers on the integrated GPU instead of the discrete one.

testuser0 · Jun 2, 2014

Hey, thanks for even responding?
You're german right? It would be easier for me in german :b

Well thanks, things are clearer now for me.
An unattended and slipstreamed installation would work

But i have a different case:

I installed Windows 7 with Bootcamp (there was no osx installed).
Now i converted the Partitionstyle to GPT, resized the NTFS Partition, created a EFI and MSR Partition. Now i'm using rEFIt to boot from any device.

Now i would like to install the EFI-Bootloader for Windows but if i try to run the bootmgfw.efi the mac just freezes....

I could use the windows7 installation-disc to restore the bootloader into the EFI partition and set the right parameters for MSR partition but as you know i cant start the installation-disc in EFI mode

Do i have any options now to use my already installed windows? :S

When my thought is right, i could use your DUET.ISO to emulate an EFI and install the bootloader into the EFI Partiton, right?
So if possible post or reupload the DUET.ISO

Thanks

orgixmh · Jun 4, 2014

MBP 8.1 HD3000 Black Screen (Loading windows Files)

Hello there, i tried to install windows 7 x64 via UEFI to my macbook pro (13) 2011 without success.
i tried to set registers my VGA card located to 00 02 00 and my bridge 00 00 00 without success.
my VGA is HD3000.
Anyone can help? if you need pci -b 00 02 00 i can post it.
Thanks for your help.

nex01 · Jun 12, 2014

ah- said:
Hey psyq321, great work! I just tried your outb-writes and with a bit of fiddling I got it to boot with just the Intel GPU. I must have had something mixed up when I tried this myself a few weeks ago.

The secret is to first set it to "Intel only" in GfxCardStatus, this is somewhat broken on osx but has the nice side effect of sticking around, so on the next reboot the whole EFI uses the Intel GPU.

Then I chainloaded Windows with

and the black screen problem was gone.

Screenshots: http://andreas.heider.io/gmux/2013/mbp113_intel.PNG
http://andreas.heider.io/gmux/2013/mbp113_gpuz.PNG

I think the reason that it wasn't working for you before is that you turned off the Nvidia GPU while EFI was still using it as the main display, and then something crashed.

That said, the Intel settings thing crashes and when trying out the Bioshock Infinite Benchmark it crashed once but then ran perfectly the second time.

Hello, Sorry I'm a complete noob.
I'm already trying to find a way for months to run my Macbook Pro Retina Late 2013 with Intel Graphics in Windows because the GT750M is sucking up so much power from the battery.

So I finally found this thread, but it's really confusing and hard to understand.

Can you or someone else explain me step-by-step how you enabled the Intel Iris Pro and disabled the Nvidia?

I installed Windows via Bootcamp assistant on OSX Mavericks.

The only thing I understood so far was:

1.) changing graphics to intel only with gfxcardstatus
2.) chainloading windows with grub
3.) installing a driver that disables Nvidia driver loading
4.) installing intel drivers?

Not sure if I understood that correctly so far, so that's why I'm asking

Thank you very much, your help is appreciated

Win7 x64 booting natively via EFI (no BIOS emulation)

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