MacBook Air 2013 is the first Mac that supports EFI booting on Windows natively

[Quackers]

Presuming that the OP's hard drive had not been formatted by him I find myself wondering whether his laptop arrived with no hybrid mbr present.
Maybe BootCamp is responsible for creating the hybrid mbr normally and the change is in BootCamp's processes as well as different EFI firmware.
Interesting all the same.

 

[bogdan.tam]

Yes, the MacBook Air 2013 supports booting Windows via EFI natively.
I used official Bootcamp drivers with no mods whatsoever.
Everything is working flawlessly.

It seems the bootloader in the MBA 2013 is finally UEFI 2.0 compliant.
The entire stock partition layout of the SSD is GPT meaning BIOS-mode Windows will not work.

I get 10 seconds of Windows 8 bootup. Enough said.
I seem to be getting 8 hours of usage in light use. Not bad.
There seems to be graphic corruption in IE11 in Windows 8.1 with the current Intel drivers.
Make no mistake IE11 is the better browser on Windows. Seriously better than Chrome.

I only tested on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.
I did not test Windows 7 and have no plans to since I've embraced the metro interface.

I recommend using Trackpad++ to have a better trackpad experience in Windows. I mean seriously Apple? Where is the Windows 8 gestures and especially pinch-to-zoom?

Update: Windows to Go (ala Windows on external drive) also works on EFI

Apparently the corruption that appears in IE on win8.1 does appear in Firefox, too.
Also, as I observed today, when running films, they crash at the moment the subtitles need to show on film. I hope Intel will repair this problem, because it kind of is an old one, as you stated it here since June.

 

[Livewings]

Presuming that the OP's hard drive had not been formatted by him I find myself wondering whether his laptop arrived with no hybrid mbr present.
Maybe BootCamp is responsible for creating the hybrid mbr normally and the change is in BootCamp's processes as well as different EFI firmware.
Interesting all the same.

Nope, the Bootcamp on MBA 2013 does not use Hybrid MBR, it uses GPT exclusively.

----------

Apparently the corruption that appears in IE on win8.1 does appear in Firefox, too.
Also, as I observed today, when running films, they crash at the moment the subtitles need to show on film. I hope Intel will repair this problem, because it kind of is an old one, as you stated it here since June.

Install Intel latest 8.1 beta drivers. It will remove the corruption.

 

[Quackers]

Nope, the Bootcamp on MBA 2013 does not use Hybrid MBR, it uses GPT exclusively.

Excellent! That's definitely a step in the right direction. I hope they can make other machines do the same thing with an update
Then I can use BootCamp again instead of EFI booting Windows 8.

 

[chris0701]

Windows 8.1 WTG Installation Failed

I followed the steps for WTG creation, but my Win 8.1 installation will complain error , prompting system reboot.

So I would like to confirm the prerequisite for EFI boot option on Macbook.
1)Do I need to use Bootcamp assistant for EFI partition before WTG initialization ?

Press Option key during boot, my WTG USB disk listed as "Windows" on screen. Is it correct ?


Thanks for your help.
Macbook 2013,13-inch. OS X Maverick.

 

[Quackers]

Livewings could I ask you to confirm which graphics driver is being used in Windows?
Also which Monitor driver is in use in Windows?
Thank you.

 

[monkeybagel]

MacBook Air 2013 is the first Mac that supports EFI booting on Windows natively

This is actually incorrect. The Mac Pro at least as far back as 2010 will install and run Windows 8/8.1 in EFI mode with no issues.

 

[Quackers]

This is actually incorrect. The Mac Pro at least as far back as 2010 will install and run Windows 8/8.1 in EFI mode with no issues.

Not through Bootcamp.

 

[monkeybagel]

Not through Bootcamp.

Not sure what you mean. Bootcamp is only partitioning software along with a driver creator utility.

 

[Quackers]

Not sure what you mean. Bootcamp is only partitioning software along with a driver creator utility.

If you partition with Bootcamp (as the OP did) a hybrid mbr is normally created. This stops Windows installing in EFI mode as that requires GPT-only.

 

[ttx336]

EFI/GPT benefits

Can someone explain what this means? I'm just getting my first mac and I have no idea what half of the stuff in this thread means.

They're talking about EFI or BIOS booting. Mac uses EFI, windows came with EFI support starting with 7 but it wasn't entirely supported; now apparently you can boot windows through EFI rather than emulating the BIOS environment, which is a speed-up.

If I understand correctly, and this is a huge benefit to us triple-booters, the ability to use GPT (read: more than 4 primary partitions) is invaluable. The older BIOS environment used the MBR (Master Boot Record) and limited us to 4 primary partitions, it seems that the GUID Partition Table (GPT) lifted that restriction. So, when, like me, you use Mac OS, Win7 and Fedora20, or the like, I would think that the EFI/GPT would make your life much easier. I spent the better part of 4 days getting my mid-2010 MacBook Pro set up properly. It's running great now, but it was an extremely painful process. The thought of using EFI/GPT... makes me want to run out and buy that 2013 MBA...

 

[mlodyTM]

Everything works GREAT !!!!!

On my Macbook 11 AIR 2013

How about another Macbooks ? Pro Retina 2013 ? also works with EFI ?

 

[Livewings]

Everything works GREAT !!!!!

On my Macbook 11 AIR 2013

How about another Macbooks ? Pro Retina 2013 ? also works with EFI ?

Yeap. It works with my 15" rMBP Late 2013.

 

[thomaskc]

So is it really just as much a matter of windows 8 having better support or is there direct changes to the way apple supports bios mode etc from the mid 2012 macbook's to the 2013s ?

Like would installing windows 8.1 this way work on say a mid-2012 macbook pro?

 

[sw6lee]

I installed windows 8.1 yesterday on my 11 inch MBA, and I chose Windows (or maybe it was WININSTALL, not remember), and did NOT choose EFI mode, but installed fine. I think it just automatically changed to EFI mode thogh but not sure..when I clicked on Windows, it had those BIOS looking screen saying, booting from boot camp created disk, or something like that, and it showed the blue windows logo. Now if I reboot into windows, it doesn't have any BIOS looking screen. Just straight to windows logo. I really hoped I did wrong and wanted to re-try with EFI mode because my battery life sucks. I only get about 6 hourse. I already heard that Windows on Mac will have shorter battery life, but there are quite a few people on forums that they have amazing battery lives with Win 8 install. I'm so envious..or maybe they are just giving false info without testing battery life thoroughly. I don't do heavy task stuff, just regular web browsing, html5 youtube app, some music, etc.

 

[sw6lee]

Make sure when you boot into Windows, it doesn't have this.

Image

Instead, it should be directly showing the Windows logo from the moment you press Enter in choosing your Windows partition.

Okay I take my post above back. I am in a dark room right now, and when I rebooted, I could see that BIOS screen, with black background and blinking dash symbol. So does that mean I'm not booting from EFI? After like 1 second of BIOS screen, it showed the blue windows 8.1 logo.

 

[faslane]

Yes, the MacBook Air 2013 supports booting
Make no mistake IE11 is the better browser on Windows. Seriously better than Chrome.

Worse browser ever and is much slower than Chrome or Firefox on my Quad-core 3.4GHz 2013 27"iMac with 24GB ram and 2TB video. IE blows...

 

[joshlalonde]

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?

Ah, that's foolishness. Of course they should make it super optimized. There's always a chance that someone will be so impressed with iTunes performance compared to other programs and choose to switch to Mac OS X. Software like that is kind of like bait. Same thing as Microsoft making Office for iOS.

 

[renderedone]

Win 8 to Go?

I've been banging my head against the wall trying to get Win8 to Go to even boot on my Macbook Air 2013. It always starts the boot process, but BSODs eventually with INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE.

How did you get it to work?

 

[wmy5]

In /Application/Boot\ Camp\ Assistant/Contents/Info.plist I found those strings

<key>PreUEFIModels</key>
<array>
<string>MacBook7</string>
<string>MacBookAir5</string>
<string>MacBookPro10</string>
<string>MacPro5</string>
<string>Macmini6</string>
<string>iMac13</string>
</array>

So it seems like models listed above and any model prior to those will NOT install Windows in UEFI mode by default, whereas models newer than those will install Windows in UEFI.