Dual booting Win/OSX TLDR: Not a hack tool (please, no locking!)
Dual booting Win/OSX TLDR: Not a hack tool (please, no locking!)
Hello! It sounds like you're dealing with a tricky setup since your Mac runs on EFI. Everyone using EFI should be able to dual boot Windows, but sometimes the process gets stuck in legacy mode. You mentioned trying an EFI-only installer from another Windows machine and getting stuck at the old boot menu. That’s frustrating! Have you checked if your installation media is properly formatted or if there are any conflicting system files? Also, ensure your macOS version supports dual booting with EFI. Let me know what you find!
It’s good news you’re not interested in Hackintosh since it’s aimed at budget users. I regret letting you know your main choices are Bootcamp or virtualization options like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. If you already had a Bootcamp partition with Windows installed, you need to press the option key during startup.
I know I'm a tech guy myself but this is so undocumented (you know, THANKS CRAPPLE) - Macs use EFI to boot, Windows uses EFI to boot (at least on anything modern) so why can't installing Windows (10 as well) on OSX use EFI boot? it drops to legacy straight away for some reason, there has to be a solution for it, your answer unfortunately wasn't too helpful, but thanks for the comment. I'm aware of bootcamp (hell i mentioned it in OP) but that doesnt seem to help and the boot manager fails to see my EFI only usb key for windows unless it needs to be formatted differently!
And yes, using an EFI bootloader from a USB should function too. I've modified a laptop for testing and successfully ran it from a flash drive. Just confirm the USB is 2.0 speed.
Yes, I also created one on Windows using M$'s utility, but it still defaults to the old boot option. rEFIt allows me to start from an EFI Windows USB drive (though I need to remove the legacy boot files from the USB for it to work), but I prefer sticking with macOS's default bootloader even though it doesn't always work perfectly. I've used rEFIt before but didn't remember about it. Thanks.