search

maharmstone / quibble

Quibble - the custom Windows bootloader
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
2.12k stars 81 forks source link

Documentation about booting windows #1

Open mimi89999 opened 4 years ago

mimi89999 commented 4 years ago

Hello,

AFAIK, this is the first bootloader that is able to boot Windows directly. All other bootloaders/bootmanagers I now are just chaining bootmgfw.efi.

Is there any publicly available documentation on how to boot Windows and Windows boot process? If not, would it be possible to document that?

maharmstone commented 4 years ago

Not quite the first - Freeldr does something similar, but it only works up to XP. I'm fairly certain this is the first to do it on modern versions of Windows, and the first to do it with EFI.

There's not really any public documentation. Anything that I didn't find out from Freeldr or Geoff Chappell's website I had to reverse-engineer.

mimi89999 commented 4 years ago

Would it be possible for you to document it?

mimi89999 commented 4 years ago

Would it be possible for you to document it?

sskras commented 3 years ago

Folks, not for going off the topic much but still:

does this bootloader support only UEFI mode? Can it boot Windows in Legacy mode too? I guess the process is very different in the latter case (and would need very different documentation)

TheMadHau5 commented 3 years ago

AFAIK, Quibble requires a CSM-enabled UEFI, and it then boots Windows in legacy mode (using the CSM) to allow certain drivers (like WinBtrfs) to be loaded easily (even with Secure Boot enabled). I don't think there is a way to use Quibble from a pure BIOS, however.

maharmstone commented 3 years ago

@TheMadHau5, you're a bit out of date there, Quibble supports CSM-less booting now (on Windows 8 and above).

I've not tried it with Secure Boot, presumably it involves signing the images or whatever it is you do.

TheMadHau5 commented 3 years ago

Oh ok, didn't know about the update. Secure Boot requires either a signed certificate or a shim, yeah.

alou-S commented 3 years ago

Folks, not for going off the topic much but still:

does this bootloader support only UEFI mode? Can it boot Windows in Legacy mode too? I guess the process is very different in the latter case (and would need very different documentation)

You could try using Clover bootloder which has UEFI emulation and then pointing clover to the Quibble bootloader. I currently use clover to run a Windows GPT installation on my Legacy BIOS motherboard. Haven't tried Quibble yet (It didn't even work on my UEFI based laptop so I don't have much hope) There is also TianoCore DUET which you could possibly try