Win7, UEFI and deleting GPT partitions

[KillaVolt]

I'll try to make this as clear as possible, but sometimes I muddle things up

I purchased an Acer Travelmate P276 that has windows 7 pro installed, and is capable of upgrading to windows 8 (actually it's windows 8 with downgrade rights and came with 7 preinstalled)

So this laptop is ready to use windows 8, except that I hate windows 8 and will never use it. I specifically bought this laptop for windows 7. period.

Normally I would drop in a new hard drive, install windows 7 clean and be done with it, but this laptop has an SSD built into the mobo as well as a removable drive and is setup with GPT partitions.

Here's what I want to do, delete those partitions, convert them to MBR and reinstall windows 7 clean.

The partitions in question are hidden and have no drive letters assigned to them, symantec system recovery is unable to create an image of them so I don't have anything to fall back on (that's why I'm here asking questions) and they are as follows.

ESP
Recovery
Push Button Reset

Recovery is for Acer and I know I can delete that safely, what I'm curious about are the ESP and PBR partitions.

Long story short, would they be needed ONLY for windows 8 with the laptop running in UEFI mode or if I delete those partitions, would my laptop fail to boot?

ESP contains boot files but they can only be viewed when I used Active@ to make an image and explore it.

 

[r00tb33r]

Start up from Windows installation DVD (not manufacturer's recovery disc!), open command prompt and use the diskpart utility.

At the diskpart prompt use these (and Google for more if you need them):
list disk to view disks your system has
list partition to view partitions your system has
select disk # to point diskpart to a specific disk where # is the number of the disk
clean to clear partition table of the selected disk
convert mbr converts disk structure to tradition layout with MBR
exit to exit diskpart

That should remove all your GPT partitions.

You will need to switch your UEFI to CSM or whatever your UEFI utility calls legacy booting to boot in the future with Windows 7.

That's the short answer. Regarding UEFI there's a longer answer which may require you to explore things yourself because people on this forum don't have sufficiently deep knowledge to help you regarding UEFI+Windows 7.

 

[KillaVolt]

I was just looking through diskpart actually, and that will most definitely allow me to wipe all the partitions and start fresh, but my biggest concern is the ESP partition that UEFI firmware uses.

If I delete that partition will my laptop still boot?
right now it's in legacy mode and I don't really have any plans to ever upgrade to windows 8 at least not until I'm forced to (by then windows 15 will be out lol)

And what about that push button reset partition? that's windows 8 specific right?

 

[r00tb33r]

I was just looking through diskpart actually, and that will most definitely allow me to wipe all the partitions and start fresh, but my biggest concern is the ESP partition that UEFI firmware uses.

If I delete that partition will my laptop still boot?
right now it's in legacy mode and I don't really have any plans to ever upgrade to windows 8 at least not until I'm forced to (by then windows 15 will be out lol)

And what about that push button reset partition? that's windows 8 specific right?

Your UEFI will continue to function with no HDD at all, not just without those partitions. Some of those partitions may contain UEFI utilities, like diagnostics, but those are not mandatory. You should be able to safely nuke them all.
So you may have a UEFI utility partition, a Windows boot partition, your primary data partition, and probably also manufacturer's recovery partition. If you burn recovery DVDs I think you will be able to restore all of these.
So if you get rid of all that, you will lose built-in recovery and perhaps some utilities, but otherwise it should be OK.

 

[KillaVolt]

The problem with creating a factory default backup (I'm going to contact acer about this) is that it wants to burn 15GB to a dvd and won't let me select an external drive.

I don't really care about all the extra apps or utilities, this laptop will be a windows 7 dedicated laptop and I prefer to just use my copy of win 7 pro.

 

[r00tb33r]

Sounds like you are in the same boat with everybody else. Every manufacturer has their own way of creating recovery media. Toshiba for instance will work with 4.7, 8.5GB discs and thus resulting in different number of them, as well as a USB drive where you don't have to burn any discs at all. I doubt that Acer will magically reduce the number of discs you have to burn though. I think you will just have to do it in the end.
Good luck!

 

[KillaVolt]

I spoke with acers chat support, who most times really don't grasp the concepts, but they said the recovery discs will work if the partitions have been deleted as well so at least I have that fall back option.

as for creating them on my external drive, apparently that only works for certain laptops.

The other bad thing is that their recovery program will totally wipe an external drive resulting in complete data loss.
oh yes, they mention that it will delete all data, but they allow you to select which partition to use for the backup.....and then it deletes all partitions and makes a single new one.

I went through this and almost lost a TON of stuff...thankfully I was able to recover it.

So, I'm burning the DVD's now and then I'll probably dabble with wiping the entire friggin thing clean.

I wouldn't have to do this except Symantec System Recovery doesn't seem to want to work properly with GPT partitions.

 

[r00tb33r]

I used to use Acronis Disk Director a lot for my imaging needs, though I have no idea if they have GPT support. I would imagine they now do, after all they have one of the best products on the market.

 

[KillaVolt]

Acronis won't let me do anything with those partitions. The only option it gives me is "copy volume" which also fails to work.

It's version 12 though so maybe there is a newer version that works better.

 

[r00tb33r]

Acronis won't let me do anything with those partitions. The only option it gives me is "copy volume" which also fails to work.

It's version 12 though so maybe there is a newer version that works better.

I mostly imaged drives, not partitions. When you image it as sectors Acronis doesn't care what a volume is or what a file is, it just creates a raw image, and with compression if you choose to have it. It has options for filesystems it knows so you aren't imaging empty space, but if it doesn't recognize the filesystem it can still make a raw image.

 

[KillaVolt]

Disk Director 12 doesn't have any options for imaging, letalone doing a raw backup. That being said, I did try Active@ bootdisk, which does let me select "all drives" and do a raw image, but upon performing the task and exploring the image I can clearly see that it didn't image all of the partitions, and the sizes don't match so obviously something is preventing these programs from doing the job the way it's supposed to be done.

 

[r00tb33r]

Did I actually say Disk Director? Must have been very late. I meant to say TrueImage. Product of the same company. You should have picked up on that.

 

[KillaVolt]

I did pickup on it, but I don't know if there was a newer version that combined those features/products or if it was just a mistake.

I've got my Acer recovery DVD's which they say will fix the system even if the partitions were deleted so I should be ok to just wipe the entire system and start 100% from scratch.

After reading some things though I'm curious, can I run Windows 7 with UEFI enabled?

 

[r00tb33r]

Yes, you can run Windows 7 with UEFI but there are a lot of caveats. You may encounter some problems during installation which you may need to work around. I had a particularly difficult install on a new Toshiba that came with Windows 8.1.