I’m currently pulling out hairs about a problem with my wife’s new Samsung Book 9 laptop.
it comes preinstalled with Windows 8. She wants Windows 7 Pro.
I’ve board a Windows 7 Pro 64-bit for her and thought that this would be just like a regular “clean Windows installation” but unfortunately that has not been the case.
From Samsung’s website I followed some instructions on how to configure the BIOS to be able to function with Windows 7. That meant to change the BIOS specification from UEFI to CSM.
I disabled the Fast Boot config so it would recognize my portable DVD-drive and changed the Boot-sequence.
I also disabled the Secure Boot configuration.
Everything worked and I could boot from the Windows 7 dvd and begin the installation process.
But the problem came when going into the section where one can choose partitions for the installation, delete, format and create new. I deleted the Windows 8 partition and created a new but I got an error at the bottom of the screening telling me that I could not install on this partition.
When going into Details on that message it stated that it could not be installed because it was running on GPT partition and not NTFS.
I should say that i did not delete all partitions because one of them was the Windows 8 recovery and I would be able to go back to the preinstalled version of Windows if anything went bad.
I’ve been searching Google, forums and communities, Youtube videos and what not to hope to find an answer but no where I’m getting closer to the answer.
My questions are:
Do I need to delete the entire SSD drive in order for it to go back to NTFS?
Is there anyway that Windows 7 can be installed on UEFI with GPT?
Does anyone might have experienced something similar which has some advice for me to make a clean install of Windows 7??
I’m having a hard time to accept that it just ain’t possible to run anything else than Windows 8 on a computer.
Any help or advice would be so very much appreciated.
Cheers,
– M
Best Answer
First, you're conflating two or three different things (perhaps because of poorly worded program messages):
Both Windows 8 and Windows 7 support BIOS and EFI. Your choice of boot mode dictates your choice of partition table type. The error message about GPT was an indication that you'd booted the Windows 7 installer in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode, so it was expecting MBR, and when it saw GPT, it complained. You must use NTFS as your boot (usually
C:
) filesystem, whether your partition table type is GPT or MBR, and if you use additional data partitions, you'll probably want to use NTFS on them.Thus, the question becomes: Which boot mode do you want to use? Most Windows 7 media make it easier to boot in BIOS Mode than in EFI mode. Various sites describe how to boot Windows 7 in EFI mode for installation to a GPT disk, though. This site, for instance, describes the process; however, I've not read it thoroughly and so can't vouch for its accuracy.
If you decide to install Windows 7 in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode, you'll need to wipe the GPT data from the disk. A full-disk wipe, as Understood has suggested, is one option; however, that's overkill. You could use my GPT fdisk (
gdisk
) to wipe just the GPT data by using thez
option on the experts' menu. Any partitioning tool that enables you to create a fresh MBR data structure should do the job, too, although some of them (including Microsoft's tools) won't completely wipe the GPT data structures. The leftover GPT data could cause problems in the future, should a disk utility look for them and become confused as a result. (Many Linux installers will do this, for example.)There are a few advantages to using EFI mode for booting, but most of them are quite minor or won't apply in all cases: