Efi

[mosx86]

I was reading up on EFI on wikipedia and came across this statement:

EFI mandates the FAT filesystem, a familiar standard. Using EFI, disk partitions are not MBR, but instead GPT.

If this is _true_ what does this mean for HFS+?

 

[nixgeek]

I don't know if this necessarily means much for HFS+ in a negative sense. These new Macs are using EFI right now from what I can tell. I just saw on OSNews that WIndows XP won't run on them because they're using EFI, but that Windows Vista might.

Besides, I would check somewhere other than Wikipedia just to be sure (considering the issues that have arisen there). It's possible that the Wikipedia entry might not have been updated to include the information on the new Intel Macs.

 

[mosx86]

...poking around and the Core Macs? Intel Macs? (what do we call these things?) are using HFS+.

 

[fryke]

You call them "intel Macs" or by their product names (iMac, MacBook Pro).

 

[scruffy]

I got the impression that FAT filesystem was required for the FS that contains EFI extensions - not the FS that the OS lives on. So, if there's a small flash disk, or a tiny HD partition that contains additional features for EFI (it's much more extendable than BIOS), that has to be FAT.

I could have misunderstood though...

 

[scruffy]

Incidentally - EFI is capable of loading GRUB, GRUB is capable of loading Windows XP (although EFI is supposed to take the place of the bootloader, so this would probably fall under the category of a hack).

So, I'm guessing it won't be too long before someone figures out a clever way to get from EFI into XP on an Intel Mac...