Installing win7 (non EFI VGA card)

[jimmy84]

I have a mac pro 3.1 (2008). I installed a non-EFI vga card (AMD RADEON HD 6800) and everything works fine except I don't get the OS selection screen, so my default OS is Win7. The system is running slow and I want to reinstall Win7 so my question now is how to reinstall Win7 if I can't get the OS selection screen?

The current Win7 had been installed prior to replacing my old Mac VGA card with a non-EFI one.

 

[Quackers]

Doesn't Macintosh HD appear in a boot menu if you hold down the Alt key during boot?

 

[xcodeSyn]

The system is running slow and I want to reinstall Win7 so my question now is how to reinstall Win7 if I can't get the OS selection screen?

Do a NVRAM (PRAM) reset (Cmd + Option + P + R) and it'll boot into your OS X drive as default.

Doesn't Macintosh HD appear in a boot menu if you hold down the Alt key during boot?

Not if you use a PC video card in an old Mac Pro as the OP does. The 2013 Mac Pro won't have this issue anymore.

 

[Quackers]

Not if you use a PC video card in an old Mac Pro as the OP does. The 2013 Mac Pro won't have this issue anymore.

ooh thanks for that. I've only had one Mac so far so don't know the foibles of older ones

 

[jimmy84]

Doesn't Macintosh HD appear in a boot menu if you hold down the Alt key during boot?

Do a NVRAM (PRAM) reset (Cmd + Option + P + R) and it'll boot into your OS X drive as default.

Not if you use a PC video card in an old Mac Pro as the OP does. The 2013 Mac Pro won't have this issue anymore.

Thanks guys for the quick reply..
But when installing Win7 with bootcamp with a non-EFI VGA card installed, should it boot normally to Win7 installation screen? or it will crash due to driver conflict? taking into account that the VGA card actually works with mac and windows but without boot screen.

 

[xcodeSyn]

But when installing Win7 with bootcamp with a non-EFI VGA card installed, should it boot normally to Win7 installation screen? or it will crash due to driver conflict?

Yes, it will boot into Windows just like a normal PC. The EFI part of the graphics card is useful only when booting into OS X and has no effect on Windows at all. The Windows installer has the generic video driver to display the low resolution image during the installation process. You just need to download and install proper video drivers from the AMD website and the Boot Camp drivers for other hardware components after installation.