Windows 7 install on a GPT disk?

By founderbrn
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founderbrn

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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...

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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

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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.

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