FreeBSD with Win7 and UEFI

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 30 Dec 2014 16:03:22 +0100, Christian Baer wrote:
> Am 28.12.2014 um 20:40 schrieb Warren Block:
> 
> > UEFI is a whole new game, utterly different from what came before.  And
> > FreeBSD's UEFI support is new.  As far as I know, it has no provision
> > for multibooting in UEFI.  Code to do that would be welcome, it's been
> > difficult just to get the current UEFI support.
> 
> Yes, I've read about that and the fact that it has been quite hard. This 
> actually did surprise me a bit, considering that UEFI has been around 
> for a while now.

AS/400 is around since the 1980's, and still I can't find
a Linux or BSD that will run on it. ;-)

The problem with UEFI seems to be that, even though there
is documentation and attempts of standards, it's still a
tricky black box, and manufacturers don't want to tell what
goes on in their "micro OS" BIOS replacement.



> In this case, I really went out of my way to make it overly clear, that 
> I was booting me computer in EFI mode and that the boot menu is from the 
> mainboard's firmware and offered before a single access to the SDD has 
> been made. I would get this boot loader (or boot menu) if I removed all 
> drives from my system and pressed F12 while starting the system.

Using the traditional FreeBSD boot manager would surely
be the more appealing option. Depending on if you can try
to use MBR partitioning instead of GPT (and therefore,
using the boot0 boot manager with MBR), this might be
worth a try. UEFI seemed to support both MBR and GPT.
But this is just a W.A.G., I don't have any UEFI hardware
here to verify, and I'm not a "multi-booter" anymrore,
sorry.



> And it does offer a little something that I currently do not have: More 
> time. If I miss the right moment, I can't choose the OS, the computer 
> just boots up Windows as this is the default and I cannot set the 
> default to FreeBSD.

This is the typical limitation by UEFI. If you can use
FreeBSD's boot manager, a default will be available which
will boot the desired FreeBSD if no action is taken at
system startup. But as far as I understand, this will
require MBR partitioning in combination with UEFI...



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...