Test this out with the Mac OS X or Windows USB drives. Since we’re dealing with USB drives, your Mac may or may not support booting from them.
For your Windows 8 USB drive, you can use Microsoft’s Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool from within Windows to “burn” your Windows 8. Once you have those, prepare your Mac OS X drive by using Lion DiskMaker, which itself requires that you have the original copy of Mac OS X 10.7, 10.8 or 10.9 somewhere on your computer or external media.
Honestly, I went right back to the traditional BIOS/Boot Camp method after getting this post up, since the slightly faster boot times weren’t worth critical hardware not functioning properly.įirst, you’ll need two USB flash drives, one that will be for Mac OS X, and the other that will be for Windows 8. This isn’t the fault of Windows or various drivers, but rather the way Apple’s EFI implementation is. In my case, audio wasn’t working, and neither was hardware-accelerated video/graphics.
Make sure you have at least an hour of free time to dedicate to this, plus the time it’ll take you to get your operating systems back to the way they were before.
Boot times through the traditional BIOS method isn’t dramatically far off afterwards, either. After you set it up the way you want, it’ll more than likely slow down. But as mentioned above, this was on a fresh install of Windows 8. All told, the boot times have increased tremendously. I completed this on my 2012 base-13″ MacBook Air. Keep in mind that everybody’s Mac hardware is different.
If you follow the steps closely, you shouldn’t run into any issues. In addition, it will take a fair amount of time to complete. And quite honestly, that’s the only reason I see switching from the traditional BIOS method to the EFI method. Going this route isn’t so simple, and you’ll more than likely run into hardware compatibility problems afterwards that only Apple can fix with EFI updates. For example, your boot time could go from 25 seconds to as little as 3, but that’s on a fresh of install of Windows and isn’t very representative of real-world numbers.
One of the more obvious reasons for switching to EFI from the Mac’s virtual BIOS/Boot Camp method is that your boot times will greatly improve, especially if you’re using an SSD (see the video example below).