Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI.Speaking at Intel Developer Forum San Francisco, Microsoft development manager, Andrew Ritz, also revealed that there will never be any support for booting Windows via EFI on systems with 32-bit processors.
Although Microsoft has previously said EFI booting would be supported by Vista, Ritz admitted that EFI support won't be seen in any version of Windows until the release of Longhorn Server.
It will not be available in the release version of Windows Vista later this year – Microsoft says people will have to wait for an unspecified 'subsequent release of Windows client'. Ritz could not say whether that would be a service pack update to Vista or the next-generation of Windows.
That's terrible news for Intel Mac users who have been hoping that they could dual-boot Windows and Mac OS X on their new Macs: not only are their processors not 64-bit (and thus will never be supported by Windows EFI booting) but Windows Vista won't boot on EFI anyway.
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