Question Windows installer won't format partition

[Dimitri001]

I got an old computer from someone that (I think) has Win11 installed on it. I'm trying to install Win10 and when I'm in the Win10 installer and tell it to format the Win11 partition it says, "We couldn't format the selected partition. [Error: 0x8004242d]."

Anyone know what the problem is?

EDIT:

Oh, wait, I missed a notification at the bottom. It says:

Win cannote 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 does that mean?

 

[rgd1101]

what the old computer spec? older than your?

 

[Dimitri001]

No, it's newer. I don't know the specs, it won't boot into Windows.

What I know is the GPU is also GeForce GT 710 (from my computer), a 256 GB SSD and 8 GB of DDR4.

 

[Dimitri001]

Oh, wait, I missed a notification at the bottom. It says:

Win cannote 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 does that mean?

 

[USAFRet]

Oh, wait, I missed a notification at the bottom. It says:

Win cannote 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 does that mean?

It means you DELETE that partition (ALL partitions on that drive), and reformat it as GPT.

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[lantis3]

Convert disk from MBR to GPT first

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/w...management/change-an-mbr-disk-into-a-gpt-disk

 

[onespeedbiker]

I wouldn't try to convert the MBR to GPT. If you follow the instructions on the Windows 10 fresh install, you are going to delete the MBR partition anyway, so unless you just want to do it for the experience, it will be a waste of time. The point being you don't want to keep anything from the previous install (highly unlikely it's Windows 11, if the partition is MBR) as Windows won't create a new boot partition if one already exists, so your just asking for more problems down the road.