Not having UEFI PC at home, I've seen only few UEFI laptop. I'm not the best one to talk about it There are many things written on it Here is a presentation by Adam Williamson: A reliable site with many good things written by Roderick Smith: for UEFI based computers Grub2 is compatible with UEFI, it is mostly used in Linux distributions and mainly for 64 bit UEFI firmware PC.
Grub4dos 64 Bit
I don't know how many Linux distributions support the 32 bit UEFI. It seems that only few tablet are 32 bit uEFI and therefore developpers are less interested. It is added here to provide a USB (Fat32 required) Multiboot menu, as it is done for Bios based computers with grub4dos or isolinux. It allows to add some 64 bit uEFI tools (eg: memtest86, kon-boot) or others OS (eg: Linux disto, Parted Magic). There is a checkbox in 'Copy to USb-device' to add it for those who prefer rather than the standard boot which remains available of course.
However, most 64 bit UEFI PC, but not ALL, have an option to enable the Compatibility Support Module (CSM). It is a component of the UEFI firmware that provides legacy BIOS compatibility by emulating a BIOS environment, allowing legacy operating systems. The boot in UEFI avoids the need to activate it. For info, VMware Workstation 11, available soon in december, has improve its integration with an option available since the creation of the virtual machine You would probably want to add some stuff. Hi ChrisR About a month ago, i conducted some experiments with GRUB 2 fedora package. My goal is to create a SecureBoot compatible multi-boot USB stick which can boot either Win8PEx64 or latest version of PartedMagic. Here is my test result: 1.
Gigabyte H61-MS1 Desktop MoBo - By default, 'SecureBoot' is not enabled. I can boot either of the OS without any issues (UEFI mode ).
Lenovo B50 laptop - This one came with Win8 presinstalled and SecureBoot enabled. Download notorious movie mp4. GRUB2 able to boot both 'Parted Magic' and 'Win8PE' without the need to turnoff 'SecureBoot'. SONY VAIO laptop - This one also came with Win8 preinstalled.
Also, even if GRUB4DOS was a DOS application, it runs before Windows loads, not inside of it, and would be unaffected by the inability of 64-bit Windows to run 16-bit apps. CEpeep, Jan 9, 2012 CEpeep, Jan 9, 2012. GNU GRUB (short for GNU GRand Unified Bootloader) is a boot loader package from the GNU Project. OpenSolaris includes a modified GRUB Legacy that supports BSD disklabels, automatic 64-bit kernel selection, and booting from ZFS (with compression and multiple boot environments).
Booting to 'PartedMagic' works great but GRUB2 failed to load 'Win8PE'. Whenever i try to boot 'Win8PE', i will get an error message similar to the below one.
What Is Grub4dos
/EndEntire file path: /ACPI(a0341d0,0)/PCI(2,1f)/UnknownMessaging(12) /HD(2,c880,96000,4cb097d41345de45,a6,f8)/File( efi Microsoft Boot)/File(bootmgfw.efi)/EndEntire error: cannot load image At first i though that GRUB2 package i was using is a bit old so a newer version will solve the issue. I replaced the GRUB2 Fedora package with the one from latest version of Ubuntu and the issue persisted. I began searching on the net and found that there are some UEFI firmwares which doesn't like chain-loading Windows boot loader via GRUB2 if 'SecureBoot' is enabled. If 'SecureBoot' is turned off, the same menu entry will works as expected.
The GRUB2 team identified it as a bug and as of today, the bug is not fixed. Source: So if anyone encounters an error message similar to the one i posted, just turn off 'SecureBoot' and hopefully GRUB2 will be able to chain-load 'Win8PE' in UEFI mode. Thanks for the overview.