Possible to remove the OSX partition and boot Win8 natively?

[awj]

A little bit of background first (before anyone flies off the handle at me): I've used Macs for quite a few years now; I currently have an iMac which I regularly use at home, and I also have a late-2012 MacBook Pro which I use for work. My job is as a .NET developer so I spend virtually all the time when I'm using my MacBook running Windows and almost never boot into the OSX partition.

I do still use my iMac on which Windows is not installed, but on my MacBook I almost exclusively use Windows.

So with that intro out of the way, here's my question for you guys.

I run Win8 on my latest-gen MacBook Pro via Boot Camp. Thing is, it takes 12 seconds to get through the EFI stage, and then about 3 seconds to boot Windows. As I explained above, I almost never boot into OSX on my MacBook, so I'm wondering if there's a way in which I can completely uninstall OSX and run Win8 natively.

I had thought that I would need to keep Boot Camp in order to take care of driver updates, but with the recent Boot Camp update (the March 14th update) I noticed that the drivers folder could be easily copied from another Mac system (my iMac, for example) as these are simply the Windows driver installation files and there doesn't seem to be anything more complex going on.

So could someone tell me if it's possible to remove the OSX partition and boot Win8 natively, and if so, how?

Furthermore, I mentioned above that when EFI boots into Windows it takes about 12 seconds to get past the initial white screen. Would booting into Windows natively shorten this time?

 

[chscag]

I'll try to answer based on previous experiences of forum members.

Since Windows 8 is fairly new and not officially supported by Apple (yet) there is no guaranty that you will be able to obtain drivers to support it independently of OS X. In other words, without using the Boot Camp Assistant. I realize the Windows 8 driver model is the same as that of Windows 7 but it still requires installing them.

You could certainly boot your MacBook Pro with the Windows 8 DVD, remove the OS X partitions including EFI, format the drive NTFS and install Windows 8. But that leaves you with the problem of obtaining Windows 8 drivers for your Mac's hardware. (If copying the March 14th Boot Camp update driver image from your iMac works, that problem would be resolved.)

You also asked about the length of time required to boot to Windows 8 natively versus the time it takes using the Boot Camp Assistant. I can't accurately answer that, but my gut feeling is that you're not going to save as much time as you desire.

The bottom line is yes, it's possible to do what you want. Before attempting anything, I strongly suggest making a clone of your MBP hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. I recommend CCC as it also clones the Recovery partition.