Making Vista x64 SP1 boot by EFI?

A

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The following question is probably overload for newsgroup chatting, but some
introductory guidance would be GREATLY appreciated, especially toward the
very scant MS documentation. I've come across plenty of MS tech lit talking
*about* EFI's role in BCD, but nothing so far that has a detailed
walkthrough on formatting Vista's drive with EFI and GPT.

Does Vista SP1 actually provide a way to format a HDD in GPT, with an EFI
System Partition, and so on? I'm determined to sort out how do this, even if
it means using Win Server 2K8 to format my workstation's drive. Will BCDEdit
perform these formatting operations?

Relatedly, I'm starting to feel a bit muddled about the different partitions
I'll need to create, and whether they should be secured in any way. Here's
the order, more or less, that I assume one needs to lay them down:
1. EFI System Partition
2. Win RE partition [if possible, not joined to the BitLocker partition, so
there's better CompletePC access]
3. BitLocker partition
4. Vista x64 SP1 partition
5. OS #2
6. Files

Thanks a kerjillion.
Marty
 
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Expressed more clearly: I understand that MS may be waiting on OEMs to
rebuild their tailor-made 16-bit BIOS firmware....

But presumably there's generic code built into SP1's BCD that OEMs can tap
to make it simple to create a vanilla EFI System Partition to boot Vista.
Otherwise, all of these OEM ESP implementations are going to be totally
incompatible and make the OEMs averse to being the first mover.

(Incidentally, wouldn't you love eventually to see someone hack Intel's
pathetic Robson NAND and replace it with a good, working NVRAM instant-on
OS?)

And if there's a plain-vanilla ESP that Vista SP1 can build or run from,
then could BIOS or MBR be made to redirect startup to some kind of vanilla
EFI System Partition?

Just a few hypotheticals....

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