Just wondering if Master Boot Record formatted OS drives can UEFI boot, or if UEFI booting is specific/only allowed for GUID drives.
It’s possible and I don’t even believe it after doing it myself. None the less, I’ve never seen an OS install support both Legacy and UEFI at the same time.
I found a video and decided to try it myself because I wasn’t sure if it would work on the bare metal side of things, but it did. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gWKNIz4C-o
Unfortunately didn’t have luck with Windows 7.
It’s someone with a heavy Indian accent, so I’ll just put the instructions here for those interested.
- Install Windows
- Mark the C drive partition as active in Disk Management
- Run Command Prompt as admin
- Type: “bcdboot C:\Windows /s C:”
- Restart system
- Open Disk Management
- Format the system reserved partition as FAT32
- Give the partition a new name as well
- Change the drive letter to D
- Run Command Prompt as admin
- Type: “bcdboot”
- Type: “bcdboot C:\Windows /s D: /f ALL”
- Go back to Disk Management and set the system reserved partition
as active - Restart the system and you should see a UEFI/Windows Boot Manager option in the BIOS
Anyone know if it’s possible for Linux and/or OS X/macOS?
Don’t do it. But here you go.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd-boot#BIOS_boot
You can also use Duet to help with this but I don’t think that is being maintained anymore.
1 Like