Windows 7 install on a GPT disk?

By founderbrn
in The Fast Ring (Insider Previews)

 Share

Recommended Posts

Rookie

founderbrn

Posted
Posted

Just curious if anyone knows why Microsoft didn't allow for Windows 7 to be installed on a disk formatted GPT. My system has 4 750GB drives in Raid 5, with "2 disks"... Disk 0 is about 48GB (with less than 10GB free) and has Vista Ultimate x64 installed (obviously formatted MBR), and Disk 1 is about 2TB (formatted GPT) with a whole bunch of media. I didn't plan to be dual booting, or I would have created Disk 0 to be a little larger. I must be "new" as I thought I would have been able to just shrink my 2TB disk and move some space over to the MBR disk, but after doing a shrink I can't do anything with the extra space besides make a new simple volume on the GPT disk. Am I stuck? Why in the world would Microsoft not support installing on a GPT disk by now? I was pretty upset as it was when I couldn't just create one large volume to install Vista on when I built the machine. Any help would be greatly appreciated...

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/721560-windows-7-install-on-a-gpt-disk/
Share on other sites
Rookie

founderbrn

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Thanks for the reply! So UEFI is actually a replacement to the BIOS, correct? I'm using a GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard, and I'm not finding anything in regards to my board supporting UEFI... guessing you can't just force it to work? lol Out of curiousity, since I'm using my onboard raid controller, if I were able to replace my BIOS with UEFI would that affect my array?

  • 7 months later...
Neowinian

Z3RiN

Posted
Posted
Thanks for the reply! So UEFI is actually a replacement to the BIOS, correct? I'm using a GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard, and I'm not finding anything in regards to my board supporting UEFI... guessing you can't just force it to work? lol Out of curiousity, since I'm using my onboard raid controller, if I were able to replace my BIOS with UEFI would that affect my array?

I'm just checking into this myself, fell back to a MBR since the disk I had planned to install on was blank anyway. It looks like UEFI is a feature of the motherboard, so if your current one doesn't support it - you'd need to upgrade all that, and most likely they won't support older chipsets. I'm not sure if there's any kind of supplemental update you could do to add that feature but it looks like UEFI will certainly modernize the entire boot setup making it much quicker and easier.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.

  • Posts

    • Game I've been Working On

      By +pmrd · Posted

      I made a new Cinematic/Trailer for the game, this will be the intro, still a work in progress!  I also updated the Steam page with a ton of new screenshots! 👀 https://store.steampowered.com/app/3925340/Incoherence_Dark_Rooms/  
    • Microsoft Opens Fairwater: Wisconsin AI Campus Runs as One Supercomputer via 800G Ethernet

      By +TRS-80 · Posted

      Closed-loop cooling and a custom 800G network protocol let the $7.3B campus run as one AI training machine. Microsoft confirmed June 23, 2026, that its Fairwater campus in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, is fully operational — and the engineering behind it makes the facility something fundamentally different from every data center that came before it. Where conventional cloud infrastructure racks up general-purpose servers and parcels out workloads to each one independently, Fairwater links hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200 Blackwell GPUs into a single, coherent cluster using a two-story building design, 800-gigabit-per-second Ethernet fabric, and a proprietary networking protocol co-developed with OpenAI and NVIDIA. The result, according to Microsoft, is the closest thing to a purpose-built AI supercomputer that any company has ever placed in commercial operation. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319205/20260627/microsoft-opens-fairwater-wisconsin-ai-campus-runs-one-supercomputer-via-800g-ethernet.htm  
    • The official Funny Pictures thread

      By +Edouard · Posted

    • Why it's almost impossible to produce a smartphone in the United States

      By +TRS-80 · Posted

      Last comment on this article Decades of serving as a global manufacturing hub have allowed China to build a massive talent pool in the production sector that is almost unmatched worldwide. Decades of using "forced labor" have allowed China................. UN experts alarmed by reports of forced labour of Uyghur, Tibetan and other minorities across China https://www.ohchr.org/en/press...ibetan-and-other-minorities
    • Why it's almost impossible to produce a smartphone in the United States

      By morpheus6969 · Posted

      BIG Meat Hands

  • Recent Achievements

    • Conversation Starter
      jessse3334 earned a badge
      Conversation Starter
    • Reacting Well
      JuvenileDelinquent earned a badge
      Reacting Well
    • One Month Later
      Excellence2025 earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Week One Done
      Excellence2025 earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • Week One Done
      flexorcist earned a badge
      Week One Done

  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      505
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      207
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      151
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      73
    5. 5
      macoman
      62
    Show More

  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!