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EFI version on the Retina MBP and rEFIt

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CountSessine

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 19, 2010
134
0
Have any of the lucky Retina MBP buyers who've received their laptops installed rEFIt on them? Could anyone who's done this try checking the EFI version in the EFI shell? I think the command is 'ver'.

I'm wondering if these machines support UEFI 2.0. That would certainly make dual/triple/multiple boot scenarios with Windows and Linux a lot easier than it is now.
 
C

CountSessine

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 19, 2010
134
0
Someone mentioned a fairly technical question that the apple online store's chat personnel were able to track down. I wonder if they could answer this question?
 
pesos

pesos

macrumors 6502a
Mar 30, 2006
684
190
Mine arrived this morning and I took a stab at it before I had to put it aside and get some work done.

Booted into Lion, ran boot camp, and rebooted to my sata dvd drive (win8 release preview dvd in the drive) using a usb/sata bridge. Booting with option pressed gave me a Windows option and an EFI BOOT option. Choosing the latter booted fine - looks like Apple has finally updated their uefi implementation!

However, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks when in efi mode, so I could not install it to the hybrid-MBR bungled mess the boot camp utility creates. So I fired up diskpart, cleaned the disk entirely and converted it to GPT. Ran through the first phase of setup fine, but once it reboots and boots from the SSD it bluescreens with IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. And I was stuck - didn't even seem to be able to boot from the dvd anymore.

So I initiated internet based recovery and reinstalled Lion for now. Hoping to make a little time to play with it some more tonight.

My main concern is getting native AHCI functional, and UEFI boot is one way to do that.
 
C

CountSessine

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 19, 2010
134
0
My retina MBP arrived today, and I tested it out myself with rEFIt (rEFInd, actually).

I can confirm that the new retina MBP still uses the old EFI 1.1 that other macs do - or at least that's what the EFI command line utility says. Sadly, it looks like Apple has decided to ignore UEFI 2.0. I guess it's up to the PC vendors and Microsoft to innovate here. And in the mean time, those of us who want to dual/triple boot Windows and Linux have to keep using those fragile, hacky hybrid MBRs.

Disappointing.
 
pesos

pesos

macrumors 6502a
Mar 30, 2006
684
190
CountSessine said:
My retina MBP arrived today, and I tested it out myself with rEFIt (rEFInd, actually).

I can confirm that the new retina MBP still uses the old EFI 1.1 that other macs do. Sadly, it looks like Apple has decided to ignore UEFI 2.0. I guess it's up to the PC vendors and Microsoft to innovate here. And in the mean time, those of us who want to dual/triple boot Windows and Linux have to keep using those fragile, hacky hybrid MBRs.

Disappointing.
Click to expand...

hmm odd... I was able to EFI boot my windows 8 dvd... didn't have any issues until the 2nd phase of setup (normal windows boot) when I got a bluescreen; i'm assuming driver related but don't have time right now to play around
 
C

CountSessine

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 19, 2010
134
0
pesos said:
hmm odd... I was able to EFI boot my windows 8 dvd... didn't have any issues until the 2nd phase of setup (normal windows boot) when I got a bluescreen; i'm assuming driver related but don't have time right now to play around
Click to expand...

Well...maybe Apple actually *did* update their packages/libs to parity with UEFI 2.0, but are still reporting EFI 1.1? I'll have a closer look at this when I get my EFI cross compiler set up.
 
pesos

pesos

macrumors 6502a
Mar 30, 2006
684
190
CountSessine said:
Well...maybe Apple actually *did* update their packages/libs to parity with UEFI 2.0, but are still reporting EFI 1.1? I'll have a closer look at this when I get my EFI cross compiler set up.
Click to expand...

looking forward to it! would much prefer to just natively boot windows 8 (and still have a small partition for os X for rare use)
 
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