Talk:UEFI Dual boot with Windows 7/8

Part 1
This worked on an Asrock Fatal1ty 990fx pro with an ami bios 1.90 with aptio uefi when other setups failed except for refind on usb. Worked equally well on an ASUS F2A85-V Pro with amibios 6308 and tianocore uefi. Also worked on a bargain FOXCONN R30-A1 with an amibios and tianocore uefi, dual booting gentoo with windows home server.

Fast for both Gentoo and Windows. Donahue (talk) 19:15, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Part 2
After installing the Windows 8.1 preview update, rerunning the "bcdedit /set {bootmgr} " step from Windows 8.1 was required. So far that has been the only maintenance required. Dozens of other Windows 8 updates and 5 Windows 8.1 updates have required no refind maintenance. As I have no grub/grub2/lilo/syslinux installed, multiple gentoo kernel upgrades have required zero grub/grub2/lilo/syslinux maintenance. Donahue (talk) 19:15, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Recommended to use a Separate Harddrive for Windows!
It has been previously recommended to use seperate hard drives for Windows, instead of trying to force Windows and Linux to behave well within one hard drive using multiple partitions. Primarily becuase, MS Windows seems to fight over the boot sector, as well as now boot methods such as the confusing UEFI!

For my tastes and to prevent confusion, I installed my Linux Operating Systems within one hard drive formated with GPT partition table instead of the old MSDOS partition table format. I also omitted all those confusing UEFI partitions, as GPT partition layout already provides support for greater than 2 TB partitions. As for Windows 7/8, I installed both on a second separate hard drive, still using the older MSDOS partition layout as the UEFI boot method is extremely confusing and the extra UEFI partions is required when installing Windows 7/8 to a GPT partition layout. Allowing Windows 7/8 to use EUFI, would very likely result in future maintenance problems and boot errors. (UEFI is mainly for security and for most private households, UEFI currently is irrelevant.) The downside, will not be able to fully utilize hard drives larger than 2 TB. There is also hybrid MSDOS/GPT partition layouts, but it's not standardized, yet. If you still have Windows XP (SP3 with SATA support), again I put this on another separate (third) hard drive. For my scenario, I installed using the Marvell SATA controller as trying to install this old Windows O/S on an Intel SATA will cause blue screens during install. Subsequent reboots after changing the BIOS from ATA to SATA will also cause blue screen errors and abrupt reboots when using the Intel SATA controller.

Using this layout, all of your Linux operating systems will boot reliably with GRUB/LILO. All of your Windows 7 & 8 operating systems will boot reliably, using whatever proprietary boot & rescue methods MS wants freely without interferring with Linux. The same with Windows XP. The only issue remaining would be the BIOS boot order, for which sometimes gets juggled around.

I think UEFI is mostly a joke, and only really needed within a public setting where you need to refrain people from using USB/CD boot media from taking over the computer. What would be really nice, is if Windows 7/8 could be installed to a GPT partition table layout without having to use EFI/UEFI as it's not needed for home use!

--Roger (talk) 03:33, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

rEFInd is optional
As I cannot find any need for having rEFInd installed, I've marked that section as optional. EFI stub kernel can dual boot with Windows 10 completely without rEFInd.--Charles17 (talk) 10:38, 6 June 2017 (UTC)


 * I don't like recommending EFI stub kernels. Particularly to new users who find this page. I think the section title of Optional should be changed to Recommended because rEFInd has a few rescue possibilities and does not make debugging boot so difficult on new installs. --Grknight (talk) 18:51, 30 June 2017 (UTC)