Maybe to late to help but I used my gaming box. It's an MSI main board.
As to the rest, yes.
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Anyone booting Windows 7 x64 using EFI
- Thread starter monkeybagel
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Maybe to late to help but I used my gaming box. It's an MSI main board.
As to the rest, yes.
Best done on a intel chipset motherboard. With AMD boards the add new hardware part can go rather nuts and bsod whereas with intel a lot of the drivers are identical.
Alternatively before you pull it from the PC you could always run a sysprep /generalise command from an admin command prompt.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721973(WS.10).aspx
I've done neither with a Mac Pro though - I prefer the legacy AHCI mode switch method myself.
So you left your machine in legacy mode, converted to a GPT partition table, repaired the book sector/files and did it that way?
Resurrecting this thread again 
I still have not been able to get this to work. So far, I have tried:
Installing Windows 7 x64 normally in a clean SSD with about 400MB as the first "System" partition and the rest for Windows 7.
Converted the partition to GPT.
Deleted the first partition and created the EFI partition formatted as FAT32 and 200MB
Created an additional MSR Partition and gave it drive letter S: and attempted to copy the boot files using bcdboot.
This is does not work. I would be ecstatic is someone could post some suggestions that have this working. Do you see the "Starting Windows" splash screen? As soon as my machine attempts the boot, the computer hangs on the gray screen where the Apple logo or the bootpicker would normally appear. None of the keyboards keys toggle on or off. Seems to be a hard freeze.
Thank you for any suggestions.
I still have not been able to get this to work. So far, I have tried:
Installing Windows 7 x64 normally in a clean SSD with about 400MB as the first "System" partition and the rest for Windows 7.
Converted the partition to GPT.
Deleted the first partition and created the EFI partition formatted as FAT32 and 200MB
Created an additional MSR Partition and gave it drive letter S: and attempted to copy the boot files using bcdboot.
This is does not work. I would be ecstatic is someone could post some suggestions that have this working. Do you see the "Starting Windows" splash screen? As soon as my machine attempts the boot, the computer hangs on the gray screen where the Apple logo or the bootpicker would normally appear. None of the keyboards keys toggle on or off. Seems to be a hard freeze.
Thank you for any suggestions.
If anyone is still out there...LOL... Has any of this changed with Win10? I have a legacy install that was updated from an old Win7 build I'm considering converting to allow for a RTX just released and EFI is reported as the only way to get Windows to boot.
I know Windows 8.0+ x64 will install natively and run/boot in EFI mode on at least a Mac Pro 5,1.
I detested (and still do for the most part) Windows 8+ and although Windows 10 is better, I still like Windows 7 x64 for its lack of "bundled ads" and it works well and the performance is great. I never got Windows 7 x64 to install in EFI mode with an ATI 5870, but now have an nVidia 980Ti flashed with EFI firmware, and have considered booting from a Windows 10 WinPE/Install disk and creating the EFI/MSR partitions using diskpart and using DISM to apply the Windows 7 x64 Enterprise image onto the NTFS partition to see if there is any difference.
I must say, however, I have done other upgrades to the machine (128GB RAM, 2TB SSD, etc.) so running Windows 7 x64 in Fusion gives very impressive performance. I do not play games, so running native has limited benefits now.
But I still want to try it again one day just to see if I can get it to work, and slipstream the 980Ti drivers in the install.wim file.
Agreed, I wasn't impressed with 8/8.1. I'm still holding out on a GPU upgrade so this is back-burnered for me right now. Thank you.
It's too bad the situation with the Maxwell cards and 10.14, but 10.14 really doesn't have anything that I feel I am missing. The card was primarily installed for better Windows GPU performance, as I do not use hardly any applications that take advantage of a GPU in OS X. I am actually running the 5870 right now, and in OS X 10.12, can not even really tell a difference with two LED Cinema displays (not 4k, which I feel sure would be noticeable.)
I guess it may depend on your bootrom as to whether the EFI shell will boot:
http://netkas.org/?p=1472
http://netkas.org/?p=1472