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Modern Windows file systems and my ignorance of them.

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roberttx

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I am far from being up to date with current Microsoft file systems and it has caused me a problem.

This morning, I attempted to "downgrade" a laptop from Win 8 to Win 7 Pro. I did this in a hotel room in Oklahoma City, because what else is there to do there when it's too early for anything to be open?

I have bootable USB install media and a valid COA with license key. The machine that previously ran that OS has been decommissioned and will, in all likelihood, turn into a general purpose Linux box, for when neither Windows nor MacOS is appropriate.

The install hung, because it wanted drivers that weren't on the install media. So, I went to HP's site, downloaded all the drivers and copied them to a separate thumb drive. Stuck both of them in, tried again and I was past that hurdle. Turned out that traveling with two laptops was a good idea after all.

Next, I was presented with around a half dozen partitions. Win 7 could not be installed on any of them because it wanted NTFS and these were something else (UEFI? I forget). I could not find a way of reformatting the drive from the install media.

So, what's the deal here? Do I need to create a third bootable drive, with some kind of utility on it to reformat the HDD? If so, what? I'm guessing that FDISK isn't going to cut it...
 
Whenever I have done Windows 7 installs at some point early in the installation process it wants you to choose which disk will be the target for the installation, and it displays the existing partitions on each disk in a bar graph manner.

At that point you should be able to click on any existing partitions and then delete them individually. If you delete all of the partitions on a disk you can then either tell it to create a new partition on that disk and select it as the installation target, or just select the now empty disk as the installation target and it will automatically create a new partition spanning the entire disk and format it before the installation continues.
 
Windows 7 cannot easily be installed on GPT partitions, which is what newer laptops use that are installed/booted in UEFI mode. You'd need to wipe the drive and reformat, most likely. There are utilities to create a "fake" MBR partition table on a GPT disk, but it's hit and miss.
 
If you are sure there is nothing on the drive that you need to keep, I would suggest just wiping the drive. Use DBAN or a similar utility.

Still, you should be able to delete the partitions from Windows setup, but if I recall correctly it hides the option somewhere. Then again, if what is there is too much of a mess, Windows very well might barf trying to figure them out.
 
I recently ditched my TVO service. The TVO box was $49 at Best Buy and it had a 500 GB HD in it (not a bad deal). The TVO HD was formatted GPT and I reformatted the thing using W10 Administrative Tools> Computer Management> Disk Management. No sweat - piece of cake.
 
I did eventually find where to delete the partitions in the installer. Unfortunately, the installer fails to correctly create and format a new partition.

Searching for the error message (Setup was unable to create a system partition or locate an existing system partition.") suggested that Diskpart might be the way to go, so I'm attempting that now.
 
Windows 7 can and be installed onto a GPT paritioned disk, it just has to be the 64bit version.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/hardware/design/dn640535(v=vs.85)

[FONT=segoe-ui_semibold]Can Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 read, write, and boot from GPT disks?
[/FONT][FONT=segoe-ui_normal]Yes, all versions can use GPT partitioned disks for data. Booting is only supported for 64-bit editions on UEFI-based systems.[/FONT][FONT=segoe-ui_semibold]
[/FONT]
Click to expand...

So my guess is the OP was either trying to install a 32bit version of 7, or more likely secure boot was enabled in the BIOS.
 
It's a 64 bit version, Secure Boot is disabled in the BIOS and Legacy Support is enabled in the BIOS.

It looks like Diskpart did the trick - it's attempting to install now.
 
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