Hard Drive Incompatible

[Guest]

Hello! I want to install a hard drive on my computer, but it's GPT format and apparently windows can't install on there. I read somewhere that if the system is UEFI based and it's 64 bit I can? I selected windows 64 bit and also switched the storage in BIOS to UEFI but no luck. What should I be doing? If it's false is there any other way or do I have to convert?

 

[BFG-9000]

Using the included tools on the Windows install media, you have to delete ALL of the partitions on the drive before it can be reinitialized as MBR.

There are third party bootable tools that claim to convert existing partitions without data loss, but I've never used them.

 

[Guest]

Using the included tools on the Windows install media, you have to delete ALL of the partitions on the drive before it can be reinitialized as MBR.

There are third party bootable tools that claim to convert existing partitions without data loss, but I've never used them.

So there's no way to keep it as GPT?

 

[BFG-9000]

Sure, but you must boot the USB media installer in UEFI mode to do it. The error message appears when you boot the stick in Legacy BIOS mode and the target HDD is GPT, or with some BIOSes when you boot from MBR.

To make sure this doesn't happen, the USB stick itself should be formatted GPT as well and the easiest way to do that is with rufus, if you can't get the Media Creation Tool version to work.

Note also that if you visit the Media Creation Tool download page from a non-Windows machine, you get a nice list of Windows 10 .iso files to choose from, and the DVD version seems less likely to have this problem than the USB installer.