windows cannot be installed to this disk. the selected disk is of thegpt partition style

Hello:
I bought a new laptop with w10 pre-installed. I want to install W7
because some programs don't run with W10, so I created a new 100GB
partition (D, and I boot from the W7 install disk, when asking to
choose a partition where to be installed I got:
"windows cannot be installed to this disk. the selected disk is of the
gpt partition style"
is there any trick, I need absolutely W7

Thank you

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On 23/12/2018 18:35, Maurice SAAB wrote:

is there any trick, I need absolutely W7



The trick is to convert GPT to MBR but read this before you go mad about it.

https://neosmart.net/wiki/convert-gpt-to-mbr/

If programs can't run in W10 then find a proper solution for them. For
example you can run them in "Compatibility Mode". Do you know how to do
this or can you perform a search on Google or Bing about this? Please
try it and if you fail it then post back.

Good luck.



--
With over 950 million devices now running Windows 10, customer
satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

Maurice SAAB wrote:
Hello:
I bought a new laptop with w10 pre-installed. I want to install W7
because some programs don't run with W10, so I created a new 100GB
partition (D, and I boot from the W7 install disk, when asking to
choose a partition where to be installed I got:
"windows cannot be installed to this disk. the selected disk is of the
gpt partition style"
is there any trick, I need absolutely W7

Thank you

Initially I thought this would be easy,
but I still haven't got it working.

I've got Win7 and Win10 in a boot menu,
but when I select Win7 it just throws an error.

What I did, is installed each OS on its own
disk, then copied the Windows 7 over to the
Win10 disk. But gluing in the boot stuff, I don't
understand what I have to do. There are two FAT32
partitions I can't look in, that need to be merged
somehow.

All my experiments involved booting in UEFI mode,
so the setup will work with a GPT partitioned disk.

And you really need Win7 SP1 x64 as starting materials.
The x32 doesn't support GPT.

Paul

Paul wrote:
Maurice SAAB wrote:
Hello:
I bought a new laptop with w10 pre-installed. I want to install W7
because some programs don't run with W10, so I created a new 100GB
partition (D, and I boot from the W7 install disk, when asking to
choose a partition where to be installed I got:
"windows cannot be installed to this disk. the selected disk is of the
gpt partition style"
is there any trick, I need absolutely W7

Thank you

Initially I thought this would be easy,
but I still haven't got it working.

I've got Win7 and Win10 in a boot menu,
but when I select Win7 it just throws an error.

What I did, is installed each OS on its own
disk, then copied the Windows 7 over to the
Win10 disk. But gluing in the boot stuff, I don't
understand what I have to do. There are two FAT32
partitions I can't look in, that need to be merged
somehow.

All my experiments involved booting in UEFI mode,
so the setup will work with a GPT partitioned disk.

And you really need Win7 SP1 x64 as starting materials.
The x32 doesn't support GPT.

Paul

I'm booting into the two OSes now, but it's a bit
kooky looking. Booting is steered via the BIOS popup
boot menu, which can see the two EFI partitions and
what is inside them.

https://i.postimg.cc/5y4yMTCZ/a-bit-broken.gif

Paul

On 2018-12-23, Maurice SAAB wrote:
is there any trick, I need absolutely W7

How about installing Windows 7 in a virtual machine using something
like Virtualbox? That way you can run both OSes at the same time.

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On 12/24/2018 6:26 AM, Roger Blake wrote:
On 2018-12-23, Maurice SAAB wrote:
is there any trick, I need absolutely W7

How about installing Windows 7 in a virtual machine using something
like Virtualbox? That way you can run both OSes at the same time.

Don't know how much of this is relevant, but...

Most of my experience is with dual booting linux and windows.
Biggest issue was that both OS's fought over who was in charge of boot.
Worked great if you installed in the right order...until some update
borked the whole thing. Grub just wouldn't be denied.
I finally gave up and quit trying to put multiple OS's on the same
drive. Plug-in hard drives are the way to go.

I don't have any large hard drives, so I avoid UEFI and GPT altogether.

If I were to try it today, I think I'd partition the drive MBR with three
partitions...C7:, C10: and CommonD:. I might clone C7:, but probably would
fresh install C10: and let it figger out the boot process.
If you format a MBR drive before letting windows at it, it won't create
those extra partitions. That probably won't work with GPT tho.

I have one system with two drives. One is c10: SSD. The other is C7:
and CommonD: on a spinner. I use the boot hotkey to select which drive
to boot. I remove the c7: drive letter in the win10 system. They don't
interact, so changing one doesn't mess up the other. You can
backup/restore/clone at will.

One system has a BIOS with insufficient granularity in the boot selector.
On that system, I plug in a thumb drive with the PLOP boot manager
and use that to select which partition to boot. That might make
a good experiment to see if all your bootable partitions will
actually boot. Never tried that on GPT...I should build a UEFI system
to learn about such stuff.

Having said that, I finally got enough of my legacy junk to work with
win10 that I've reverted to a virtualbox win7 for stuff that
just won't port and doesn't need a lot of resources.

Paul wrote:
Paul wrote:
Maurice SAAB wrote:
Hello:
I bought a new laptop with w10 pre-installed. I want to install W7
because some programs don't run with W10, so I created a new 100GB
partition (D, and I boot from the W7 install disk, when asking to
choose a partition where to be installed I got:
"windows cannot be installed to this disk. the selected disk is of
the gpt partition style"
is there any trick, I need absolutely W7

Thank you

Initially I thought this would be easy,
but I still haven't got it working.

I've got Win7 and Win10 in a boot menu,
but when I select Win7 it just throws an error.

What I did, is installed each OS on its own
disk, then copied the Windows 7 over to the
Win10 disk. But gluing in the boot stuff, I don't
understand what I have to do. There are two FAT32
partitions I can't look in, that need to be merged
somehow.

All my experiments involved booting in UEFI mode,
so the setup will work with a GPT partitioned disk.

And you really need Win7 SP1 x64 as starting materials.
The x32 doesn't support GPT.

Paul

I'm booting into the two OSes now, but it's a bit
kooky looking. Booting is steered via the BIOS popup
boot menu, which can see the two EFI partitions and
what is inside them.

https://i.postimg.cc/5y4yMTCZ/a-bit-broken.gif

Paul

OK, made a little more progress.

When my system has just one ESP (EFI system partition), I
can install multiple OSes in UEFI mode. (Boot the installer
DVD in UEFI mode from the popup boot, then install.)

Initially I installed Windows 10, then installed Windows 8.1
(using the install-only "fake" license keys just so
I could get past the license prompt). Windows 8/8.1 won't
install unless you present a valid key, and a person in
Germany provided us with the IT keys used for bypassing
such checks.

And both Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 seem to co-exist on the
same set of (shared) EFI partition files. One set of EFI files
supports both OSes. I was feeling a little better after that
happened.

However, when you add Windows 7, how ever you attempt
to do that, it keeps giving a 0xC0000428 error, and
complains about the signature of the file not being
acceptable.

*******

This is a menu in my BIOS that made a difference. It's
a UEFI Secure Boot Menu. At the lower parts of the page,
it has information about "keys" installed in the computer.
But at the top, it seems to have an escape mechanism so
that Secure Boot will not prevent Linux or some other OS
from being installed.

https://www.qualityology.com/wp-cont...ecure-boot.png

I changed "OS Type" to "Other OS". That menu item has two
choices on the right, it can either be "Windows UEFI mode"
or "Other OS". "Other OS" seems to help the single boot
manager on the ESP partition to work with all
*three* OSes, even the "orphan" Windows 7 SP1 OS.

*******

This is my GPT disk lineup right now. Just one ESP in the
standard location as the second partition. 100MB in size
(at a minimum), to support some flavor of FAT formatting
that they want to use. It doesn't actually have 100MB of
files inside it.

https://i.postimg.cc/50SkLS2d/three-...cdboot-run.gif

If you do

bcdboot C:\Windows

then the boot files stored in the Windows folder are copied
to the ESP partition. Since there are three OS partitions,
it's up to you to select a controlling OS. If I'm booted into
Windows 10, I can use that command to copy the Win10 files
into ESP. Then, the boot menu looks like the slick "icon"
boot menu. It's possible other choices of file sources,
would give the traditional "black window" boot menu that
looks like MSDOS or something.

If I boot the installer DVD and use the Command Prompt window
there, the command still works. However, in that case, my
Win10 partition is D: so the command becomes

bcdboot D:\Windows

The "bcdboot" command seems to be pretty good about building
the BCD file as well.

If you use bootrec /rebuildBCD (only available from the OS DVD
command prompt window) , it seems to have a bit of a problem
building the menu. The bcdboot option works from a running
OS, and that is a bit more flexible.

What follows, is the "bcdedit" info from my triple OS test install.
Basically, there is nothing of interest here, except to see that
each OS entry refers to the same "efi" file, and thus they're
all booting the same way. I'm providing the information as
proof this configuration *might* survive a Windows 10 update :-)
Might...

******* output of "bcdedit" *******

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume2
path \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-us
inherit {globalsettings}
default {default}
resumeobject {f9dca93d-088d-11e9-aa34-c387e66bf996}
displayorder {default}
{f9dca931-088d-11e9-aa34-c387e66bf996}
{f9dca93c-088d-11e9-aa34-c387e66bf996}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {default}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.efi
description Windows 10
locale en-us
inherit {bootloadersettings}
isolatedcontext Yes
allowedinmemorysettings 0x15000075
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {f9dca93d-088d-11e9-aa34-c387e66bf996}
nx OptIn
bootmenupolicy Standard

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {f9dca931-088d-11e9-aa34-c387e66bf996}
device partition=P:
path \Windows\system32\winload.efi
description Windows 8.1
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence {f9dca932-088d-11e9-aa34-c387e66bf996}
integrityservices Enable
recoveryenabled Yes
badmemoryaccess Yes
isolatedcontext Yes
allowedinmemorysettings 0x15000075
osdevice partition=P:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {f9dca930-088d-11e9-aa34-c387e66bf996}
nx OptIn
bootmenupolicy Standard

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {f9dca93c-088d-11e9-aa34-c387e66bf996}
device partition=H:
path \Windows\system32\winload.efi
description Windows 7 Professional
locale en-US
badmemoryaccess Yes
osdevice partition=H:
systemroot \Windows
nx OptIn
bootmenupolicy Legacy

******* end: output of "bcdedit" *******

If you ever need to examine the contents of the ESP, you
can do that from Linux. You're simply not allowed to do it
from Windows, no way and no how. In Windows, there is a GUID
declaring the partition type. The GUID says that is the EFI System
Partition. The attributes of the partition are set with
the Hidden bit set to 0. Hidden is *not* asserted. Yet, the partition
is not visible. I'm not even sure that TestDisk can list it.
My problem was, TestDisk was finding too much crap on the
disk, before I could access the "List Files" option, so I
was denied that access method. And I don't have any other
easy cheat methods. I'd have to clone that partition
and put it somewhere, to make the info more accessible.

In Linux, a typical sequence would be:

sudo mkdir /two
sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda2 /two

ls -R /two

sudo umount /two

Linux doesn't "automount" that partition either, but it
does respond to a bit of easy persuasion.

To determine which disk is which before attempting the mount,
you can type this in the Linux terminal.

ls /dev/sd*

then note that the sda disk goes to /dev/sda6 whereas
no other disk has quite that many partitions. That's
how I know the disk is sda, and from Windows I could
also determine which partition number contained EFI
and that was the second partition.

The only thing I did while in there, was check the
dates on the EFI files. If I saw files from 2009, the
files came from Win7. If the files were 2011, maybe
Windows 8.1. So that's what I was looking for. When
boot was broken at one point, a single file had a
later date than the other files, and that's how I
could tell how far the boot file copy operation got
before it croaked.

I don't think installing Windows 7 will be "easy", but
now that I've found a BIOS lever, it could go better
than my previous ton of test cases.

I would not recommend installing Windows 7, until you
have satisfied yourself that Secure Boot is "tame"
on your machine. Then it's worth spending the time
to try the install. Without that BIOS setting,
I tried a ton of stuff to make that partition
boot. And every attempt gave C0000428 error.

HTH,
Paul