windows 7 - Can't intall Win 7 64Bit. Something about GPT disk

27
2013-10
  • Don Salva

    I've got Asrock Z68 Extreme 3 Gen 3 with 2600k. It got the UEFI bios. I got 4 HDDs and I run them as AHCI setup.

    Now, I want to install Win7 64Bit over my Win7 32Bit. I boot up from the DVD, all goes well until the menu where I have to choose the HDD I want to install Win7 64Bit on.

    I choose c: like always and it tells me

    Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected Disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks.

    What do I do now? I'm currently in Win7 32bit writing this, and this is how my partitions look like from win7 partition manager: enter image description here

    • Answers
  • Peter Mortensen

    You need to convert from MBR to GPT. TechNet has an article, Change a master boot record disk into a GUID partition table disk, with all of the details.


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  • poke

    I just bought a new 2TB disk drive I plan to use as an external drive (connected via eSATA). When I started my computer it recognized the drive fine, but when I got into the Disk Management, a popup told me that I have to initialize that drive and I have to choose between MBR and GPT layout.

    The drive will be primarily used on Windows 7 computers (both x86 and x64) as well as on a Windows Vista x64 computer (which is the one the message appeared on).

    I do not plan to create multiple partitions on that drive as it is only supposed to be a data storage disk.

    Which partition layout should I choose, MBR or GPT? The dialog itself recommends to use GPT on drives >= 2TB or on Itanium based computers, but I want to make sure that I will be able to access the drive later on my other computers.


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  • CJM

    GPT will not be usable by XP and earlier systems (I think), so avoid it if that is an issue. Not having seen an XP machine in 3 years it's not an issue for me so I use it in preference to MBR, but it makes little difference at this point in time. At some point, you will have to use GPT, until then, make a choice.

  • BloodPhilia

    As of now, support for GPT among common systems is limited. Check out the list of supported OSes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table#OS_support_of_GPT