Boot partition question, Win7

[mikeymikec]

I have a UEFI capable board (set to ASUS's default settings on the topic of UEFI) and I installed Windows 7 on an SSD from a Win7 OEM disc.

Later, when troubleshooting an irrelevant issue, I disable the secure boot setting in the BIOS and set the boot process to legacy only. Windows refused to boot (I only got a flashing cursor in the corner after POST). Reinstating the settings that I had changed didn't help, and in the end I did a BIOS reset, which resolved that issue.

(much later) The other day I noticed in Disk Management that the 100MB boot partition on my SSD (created by Win7) is an EFI partition. I'm confused; surely Win7 doesn't support UEFI?

 

[mv2devnull]

Wikipedia writes:

Microsoft introduced UEFI for x86-64 Windows operating systems with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 so the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 are compatible with EFI. 32-bit UEFI was originally not supported since vendors did not have any interest in producing native 32-bit UEFI firmware because of the mainstream status of 64-bit computing. Windows 8 includes further optimizations for UEFI systems, including a faster startup, 32-bit support, and secure boot support.

I surely write this from Win7 that did boot with UEFI.