Dual Booting Peach OSI with Preinstalled Windows 8 with UEFI Bios System
BIOS — IBM PC’s Basic Input Output System — is taking its final bows after more than 30 years of supremacy. Taking its place is UEFI, a specification that began its life as the Intel Boot Initiative way back in 1998 when BIOS’s antiquated limitations were hampering systems built with Intel’s Itanium processors. Later, the Initiative became EFI, and in 2005 Intel donated EFI to the newly-formed UEFI Forum, a consortium made up of the usual suspects: AMD, Apple, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and so on. If you have a computer with a pre-installed version of Windows 8 - more than likely UEFI is your computer's initial boot system. Installing multiple OS's on a UEFI system is fairly simple but Microsoft® has complicated matters somewhat so you will need to follow a little different installation process for any Linux OS - Peach OSI included. Before I write more about the UEFI system - if you are one of those who just wants to jump right into how to go about installing Peach OSI on your UEFI system with a pre-installed version of Windows 8, then watch this tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ui8zgu2kc . This Youtube tutorial is produced for Xubuntu but that's just fine because Peach OSI was derived from Xubuntu. If you follow this tutorial to the letter you should have no issues installing Peach OSI along side pre-installed Windows 8.
UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, is a complete re-imagining of a computer boot environment, and as such it has almost no similarities to the PC BIOS that it replaces. While BIOS is fundamentally a solid piece of firmware, UEFI is a programmable software interface that sits on top of a computer’s hardware and firmware (and indeed UEFI can and does sit on top of BIOS). Rather than all of the boot code being stored in the motherboard’s BIOS, UEFI sits in the/EFI/ directory in some non-volatile memory; either in NAND on the motherboard, on your hard drive, or on a network share.
It is worth noting that UEFI is still incredibly young, and very few operating systems actually take advantage of any of its features. Linux certainly supports UEFI, but no Linux distro really utilizes it. Mac OS X makes slightly better use of UEFI with the Bootcamp boot manager. Windows 8, when it launched in 2012, is the first major OS to take extensive advantage of UEFI, with Restore, Refresh, secure boot, and possibly more.
If you have a computer with a pre-installed version of Windows 8, more than likely you can conclude that your computer utilizes UEFI. I recommend that you at least watch the tutorial above prior to installing Peach OSI. You also can search the web for more information of UEFI systems and how to dual boot or single boot Linux systems on computers that utilize UEFI.