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MacBook Air 2013 is the first Mac that supports EFI booting on Windows natively
- Thread starter Livewings
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Please elaborate on what kind of apps u were using as mine does NOT last beyond 6 hours- its a 2013 i5/8gb/512 ssd 11'
To paraphrase some article... Steve Jobs is so sad now.
What's Apple gonna do next? rewrite iTunes Windows so it runs as a smooth as the OSX version?
I'm sure Steve would understand that those who need to run Windows would rather have decent hardware to run it on and not the garbage spewed out by most of the PC OEMs.
Right on sir! It's worth your money!
Can anybody tweet Anand of my findings and have him verify my claims? I don't have Twitter. Thanks!
now tweeted. good work, hoping its true as I'll be jumping on the buy now button if so!
Make sure you are using the 64bit version of Windows 8 and inside your flash drive, EFI folder exists.
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It probably will.
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I basically browse, use Office 2013 & use the metro apps like MetroTube, Netflix & Hulu Plus. I don't do intense stuff on Windows. In other words, I use the better equivalent apps on Windows while Mac OS will suck like Office 2011 (Urgh!)
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Thank you.
My latest finding is booting "Windows to Go" on an external HDD using UEFI exclusively. Now I have a dedicated HDD running Windows 8.1 preview (It will work on vanilla Windows 8 also) while using Bootcamp drivers simultaneously on UEFI. How cool is that to save space?
If anyone is interested, I can make a tutorial how to do it.
What am I missing here? Windows already boots crazy fast on an MBA. Is this EFI thing really worth the fraction of a second boot improvement? Are there any OTHER improvement that might make this worth it?
Make sure you are using the 64bit version of Windows 8 and inside your flash drive, EFI folder exists.
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It probably will.
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I basically browse, use Office 2013 & use the metro apps like MetroTube, Netflix & Hulu Plus. I don't do intense stuff on Windows. In other words, I use the better equivalent apps on Windows while Mac OS will suck like Office 2011 (Urgh!)
----------
Thank you.
My latest finding is booting "Windows to Go" on an external HDD using UEFI exclusively. Now I have a dedicated HDD running Windows 8.1 preview (It will work on vanilla Windows 8 also) while using Bootcamp drivers simultaneously on UEFI. How cool is that to save space?
If anyone is interested, I can make a tutorial how to do it.
Definitely! Are you able to boot from the SDXC slot? That way a minimal size windows 8 install...?
Also, have you tried refit or refind to see what version EFI is being run? Just waiting for my Air to arrive!
Because that's not how the default Windows install works per Apple instructions. Why risk screwing up the boot sector when there is little benefit from it. From what I read on this thread, booting via EFI is like the second coming. Keeping things in perspective, it aint all that and you are going down an unsupported path.
So why?
I have not tried that. You could do the honour of being the first
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The thing is booting via EFI is the official supported way of Bootcamp in the 2013 MBA. EFI makes a huge difference on Windows 8 boot times as the boot screen shows up instantly instead of waiting around 4-5 seconds to show the Windows logo. There is no risking screwing up the boot sector as its already configured to run EFI Windows by default. The whole SSD layout is on GPT so if you tried installing bootcamp with BIOS, it can't proceed with the installation. No longer the Hybrid MBR/GPT to keep it BIOS compatible with Windows.
This would explain why I was having trouble with my Win7 installation yesterday - finally got it to work by using an .iso rather than the disk.....
Probably because I kept trying to boot through BIOS and the ISO went directly to EFI? Anyways - I'm experiencing the same performance - the 2013 MBA is everything I could've wanted it to be! Seriously a great machine.
Probably because I kept trying to boot through BIOS and the ISO went directly to EFI? Anyways - I'm experiencing the same performance - the 2013 MBA is everything I could've wanted it to be! Seriously a great machine.
I have not tried that. You could do the honour of being the first
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The thing is booting via EFI is the official supported way of Bootcamp in the 2013 MBA. EFI makes a huge difference on Windows 8 boot times as the boot screen shows up instantly instead of waiting around 4-5 seconds to show the Windows logo. There is no risking screwing up the boot sector as its already configured to run EFI Windows by default. The whole SSD layout is on GPT so if you tried installing bootcamp with BIOS, it can't proceed with the installation. No longer the Hybrid MBR/GPT to keep it BIOS compatible with Windows.
Must admit, do find it odd that there's nothing from Apple on the documentation side to say you have to use EFI for the new Air. Did you notice anything difference on the on screen instructions?
My latest finding is booting "Windows to Go" on an external HDD using UEFI exclusively. Now I have a dedicated HDD running Windows 8.1 preview (It will work on vanilla Windows 8 also) while using Bootcamp drivers simultaneously on UEFI. How cool is that to save space?
If anyone is interested, I can make a tutorial how to do it.
Does it mean that i can easily put Windows 8 to external HDD or it is still not so easy? Maybe bootcamp assisstant still doesn't accept external HD...
The 128GB SSD is not so big for a small internal Windows 8 partition + external HDD.
What is the best solution for it?
Really?
Are you using MBA2013?
Why use BIOS when you can use EFI?
What's the advantage of EFI over BIOS?
I asked the same thing and didn't get a good answer. Seems like a lot of work and risk for nothing.
I asked the same thing and didn't get a good answer. Seems like a lot of work and risk for nothing.
EFI is a complete preboot environment. Apples implementation of EFI can connect to wifi networks and restore OS X and time machine backups without needing to boot into OS X. This makes restoring a mac very easily. It also allows drives to have more than four partitions because it does not require an MBR which is very limited in space.
Booting is less complicated and boot loader or no longer needed as the EFI firmware loads operating systems directly.
But i don't think this is a major stepping stone for apple, they have been using EFI for a long time. I Windows 8 is just the first version of windows that actually supports pure EFI booting, i've been EFI booting linux on my 2009 mac pro for years.
I appreciate the explanation, but this still does nothing to run Windows better, and I keep reading about the things that DON'T work on Windows after attempting this. I just don't see the benefit for operating Windows. It seems like a lot of wasted effort to me.
This is Microsoft's first real EFI OS, (windows 7 kind of supported EFI). The only benefit your going to get from it is faster boot times. Apple has had a lot of time to use EFI effectively, while windows 8 is still new and has to support BIOS computers as well.
So your right in that respect, but technically booting windows 8 in EFI mode is the right way to do it.
Again, I appreciate this, but the "right" way of doing it doesn't do anything for me if it is not the "supported" way by Apple on their own hardware, and if it is going to cause me headaches down the road. Windows 7 already boots crazy fast in my MBA, so I am not sure going from 10 second boot time to 6 second boot time is worth the hassle. I'd rather install it the way Apple intends using the Bootcamp process so I can make sure it works right.
Reliability trumps a coupe of seconds in boot time if that is all there is to EFI booting.
There's been problems in the past to get AHCI working in BIOS legacy mode, for example. Bottom line, via EFI boot a lot of stuff under the hood will start to work as it should. There's nothing risky with doing an EFI install, if it works, it works. With Apple's support, however, there's always something that won't work right no matter if it's BIOS or EFI mode...
As another example. For laptops with both integrated and dedicated graphics cards, it should be trivial via EFI boot to support a boot option in the Boot Camp Control Panel where the user can pick either integrated or dedicated card upon next boot. Today, those laptops are stuck with the dedicated one in Windows.
However, again, that assumes that Apple cares about giving a ****.
Does your Windws 8.1 preview install recognize the WiFi driver? I can't get mine to work. Everything else seems to be fine.
edit: Never mind, I just figured it out. The driver is in BootCamp/drivers/Broadcom. Installed it and WiFi came online. Just putting out a solution for others who might run into this problem.
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How to create EFI Boot Image
I had lots of trouble understanding how to create an EFI boot image until I found this very helpful post:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/695285-how-clevo-usb-efi-install-windows-8-a.html
Brief excerpt:
First you have to create a EFI ready USB drive:
1. In an elevated command prompt type diskpart
2. List Disk
3. Select Disk # (# is your USB drive)
4. Clean
5. Convert GPT
6. Create Partition Primary
7. Select Partition 1
8. Format FS=FAT32
9. Assign
10. Exit
Next use 7zip, and unzip the Windows 8 ISO you downloaded and transfer over to your USB drive. No need to use any special programs, just drag and drop the files..."
Hope this helps someone out there! Once I created a usb drive per the directions above on Windows, my 2013 air picked it up and installed Windows 8 with no issues!
I had lots of trouble understanding how to create an EFI boot image until I found this very helpful post:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/695285-how-clevo-usb-efi-install-windows-8-a.html
Brief excerpt:
First you have to create a EFI ready USB drive:
1. In an elevated command prompt type diskpart
2. List Disk
3. Select Disk # (# is your USB drive)
4. Clean
5. Convert GPT
6. Create Partition Primary
7. Select Partition 1
8. Format FS=FAT32
9. Assign
10. Exit
Next use 7zip, and unzip the Windows 8 ISO you downloaded and transfer over to your USB drive. No need to use any special programs, just drag and drop the files..."
Hope this helps someone out there! Once I created a usb drive per the directions above on Windows, my 2013 air picked it up and installed Windows 8 with no issues!