Swad Posted March 21, 2006 Share Posted March 21, 2006 Ok, so here's what we've got so far: *Nak over at Nakful Propganda made substantial progress. Check out his posts (and the plethora of helpful comments below) here and here. *Our very own AirmanPika made more progress in this thread. He has some great ideas that will no doubt come in handy. Also check an earlier thread on the subject here. *Microsoft has confirmed that they will not be supporting 32 bit EFI when Vista ships. *A few researchers from IBM are working on a new BIOS emulator for EFI based on the Boch's x86 emulator. Check out our story on the BAMBIOS project here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AirmanPika Posted March 22, 2006 Share Posted March 22, 2006 OK so I was asked to give a bit of insight on the Vista subject as that was what I was working on prior to XP being cracked. Quick reference back to what we determined prior to the XP solution... Vista of course doesn't work with EFI without hexediting the BCD file to reference the windows boot efi No UDF support in the EFI so it can't see the DVDs Vista can run off a FAT32 partition if properly transfered over to one. No UGA support yet so black screen upon reaching installer if loaded off a FAT32 partition Now with the new XP solution a few options have been added... You can boot off the DVD as xom.efi adds UDF/ElTorito support UGA-VGA translations in the XOM.EFI so if the drivers can be loaded onto the install DVD it might work. I ran a quick test with my vista DVD (I'm finally on the beta so I can play with no guilt now ) and got the DVD to start loading. Initially you get an int error that pops up. You have to press g and enter 18 times to get past these int errors and then "Windows is loading files..." pops up and does its thing. Then the int pops up again and you press g another 20 or so times. Then black screen. OR press F8 immediately after gitting g 18 times, bring the boot menu up, press F8 again, g 18 more times, and then you get the boot options menu. Make a selection and press g 1 or 2 more times then black screen again. Effectively this gets me to the same spot I got before thanks to the UGA but I have the XOM video driver at my disposal and I now have access to the Windows Automated Installation Kit beta thanks to being on the vista beta. So...if I can use this tool and figure out how to get that driver working at initial boot of the DVD we may be good. Then again we may have to wait for new tweaks to narfs solution as it could all explode in our faces as it starts loading. Anyway thats what I have for now. Here's some pics of the limited progress I made... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amalgam Posted March 27, 2006 Share Posted March 27, 2006 OK so I was asked to give a bit of insight on the Vista subject as that was what I was working on prior to XP being cracked. Quick reference back to what we determined prior to the XP solution... Vista of course doesn't work with EFI without hexediting the BCD file to reference the windows boot efi No UDF support in the EFI so it can't see the DVDs Vista can run off a FAT32 partition if properly transfered over to one. No UGA support yet so black screen upon reaching installer if loaded off a FAT32 partition Now with the new XP solution a few options have been added... You can boot off the DVD as xom.efi adds UDF/ElTorito support UGA-VGA translations in the XOM.EFI so if the drivers can be loaded onto the install DVD it might work. I ran a quick test with my vista DVD (I'm finally on the beta so I can play with no guilt now ) and got the DVD to start loading. Initially you get an int error that pops up. You have to press g and enter 18 times to get past these int errors and then "Windows is loading files..." pops up and does its thing. Then the int pops up again and you press g another 20 or so times. Then black screen. OR press F8 immediately after gitting g 18 times, bring the boot menu up, press F8 again, g 18 more times, and then you get the boot options menu. Make a selection and press g 1 or 2 more times then black screen again. Effectively this gets me to the same spot I got before thanks to the UGA but I have the XOM video driver at my disposal and I now have access to the Windows Automated Installation Kit beta thanks to being on the vista beta. So...if I can use this tool and figure out how to get that driver working at initial boot of the DVD we may be good. Then again we may have to wait for new tweaks to narfs solution as it could all explode in our faces as it starts loading. Anyway thats what I have for now. Here's some pics of the limited progress I made... Regardless of the platform, it seems a VESA VGA BIOS is needed, as suggested here: http://lists.ppckernel.org/pipermail/pengu...ber/000311.html I'm fiddling with the 955X & 975X platform now & while I have no interest in working on a genuine Mac box, I am doing efi work on those (as time permits). If memory serves correctly, SciTech in fact was the progenitor of a replacement/enhanced VESA BIOS. Regardless whether it eventually boots to a Mac or MS OS, the processor is still an Intel, and it expects to find code in the same place. I won't try to guess regarding the ATi chipped Macs, but I'd wager a nickel that the Intel chipped ones have EXACTLY the same BIOS. In other words, the Intel chipped machines won't have Mac style video firmware. No endian problems, BIOS size disparity and so on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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