Mac Pro won’t boot from Windows 7 DVD – Flashing prohibitory sign

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I am trying to install Windows 7 on my Mac pro, I have tried everything it seems. I have a perfectly good Windows 7 DVD which boots on other devices, yet it doesn’t on mine.
First off it started with spitting out the DVD (which I can understand 😉 ), so I thought its my superdrive.
I went and bought a new drive today, except this is a SATA drive and tried to boot from there. It load the DVD fast and easy within OSX, but when I reboot and try to boot from the disk it hops to a flashing Apple logo and a deny logo (circle with a diagonal line thru it).

What am I doing wrong? The DVD is legal, its not an illegal copy (however, I tried that as well.. and didn’t work either). I googled it a bit but cannot find any similar problem.

With flashing logo’s, I mean it flashes every second between these two logos:
enter image description here

Edit 1
I have now also tried it using Windows 8, downloaded from Microsoft.

Edit 2
I have now also tried it using an Windows XP Disk. Same problem, flashing icons.

Edit 3
I have now also tried:

  • Removing all drives and installing OSX 10.6 on one of the 1TB drives.
    Using bootcamp and installing. Same problem
  • Reformatted my 750GB Drive and added MBR support. Formatted as Fat drive. Same problem.
  • Removing all drives and trying to boot from disk. Nothing happens, just a white screen.
  • Reset the PRAM so many times that I guess the computer almost tells me to give it a brake.
  • Tried booting with only C hold down. Same problem.

Nothing seems to help.

Also, I just found this page: http://support.Apple.com/KB/HT2674
According to that page, the problem is:

Circle with Slash – could not load boot.efi, or some other issue

and

Metallic Apple – found boot.efi.

More: http://support.Apple.com/KB/TS1892?viewlocale=en_US

Edit 4
I tried all evening to restore the firmware, but it just refuses. The sleep light flashes a few times, the tone comes, then the normal sound boot sound comes and OSX boot like it should. I am getting crazy here.

Edit 5
Tested as well with both 10.5 and 10.6 retail disks, they load perfectly. (Maybe due to that they have GUID formatted?)

Answer

The Apple article EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Macs
specifies that MacBook Pro 3.1 can only run EFI 1.5.1.
(From the article you can also download this EFI version.)

As Windows 7 needs EFI version 2, this means that you cannot boot Windows 7 x64 from the DVD.
Some more facts about the EFI problem can be found in Native UEFI Windows 7 Boot on Mac Mini.

You will need to convert the Windows 7 DVD that you have to one that can work on the Mac.

Some resources that may help here are :

Installing Windows 7 x64 on a Mac Pro (Late 2006)
“Select CD-ROM Boot Type :” prompt during Vista, Server 2008 (& R2) & Windows 7 x64 Boot on Macbook

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Paul Peelen , Answer Author : harrymc

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