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I have a MacBook Pro and I installed Windows 8 on it. Windows 8 took ages to boot up (15 minutes atleast).
Because the MacBook Pro is fast, I thought it must be a hardware problem and tried installing it on a VM.
When I tried installing it on an EFI enabled VM, even when not using EFI to boot, it took ages to boot.
When I installed it on a VM with the same settings except EFI disabled, it booted in seconds.
My MacBook Pro is similar to first VM - it has EFI enabled, but Windows doesn't use it.
How do I fix it? is there any way to instruct Windows 8 to not poke around with EFI even when its there?
Does it show a black screen with a flashing cursor in the top-left corner for most of the 15 minutes? – page4096 – 2012-11-03T22:00:45.753
I was under the impression that Windows 8 does not actually fully support the EFI BIOS implemented by Apple. This is likely the problem. If you have the ability to turn it off, I would, and see if the problem goes away. – Ramhound – 2012-11-03T22:06:43.290
@page4096: No, it shows Windows 8 logo and the rotating thingy. – Dani – 2012-11-03T22:07:21.327
@Ramhound: it will probably fix it, but it will make OSX not bootable. I want a way (like a boot flag) to make Windows 8 ignore it. – Dani – 2012-11-03T22:08:15.707
1Windows doesn't support EFI. It supports UEFI which is never implemented on Mac and probably not in any VM either. The EFI option you see is used to run OS X inside a VM. You should always use Boot Camp / BIOS to boot Windows on a Mac. If you want Windows to boot natively on your Mac, you must use Boot Camp Assistant. There's currently no way to set it up using some boot flag or alternative boot loader. If it takes a long time too boot with Boot Camp, you probably have a disk space, disk fragment or driver problem. In this case, you're better off using a VM. – billc.cn – 2012-11-04T00:29:16.323