Tried to install vista, but disk is MBR not GPT? Help!

Soldato
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OK.. so I've just built a PC for my nephews (2500k, H61 board, AMD 6850, 8GB RAM, XFX Pro 550W), and I tried to install Vista Ultimate 64 onto it using the old sata drive.

It throws up an error telling me the drive needs to be a GPT partition disk rather than MBR, because the motherboard is EFI.

I thought that was rather odd given that I've installed Windows 7 and Vista 64 bit ultimate on IDE drives and Sata drives before, and sure enough, even my latest 1TB disk (caviar black) is the MBR type.

I've hooked up the disk to my windows 7 machine, but the "convert to GPT" option is greyed out for all of my drives, let alone the poor old 160GB sata.

So... how can I get around this situation please? Do I need a specialist formatting tool or something?
 
Well.. I used "disk part" to solve my problem partially.

I "cleaned" the offending disk which rid it also of the oem partition (I hadn't mentioned that), and then it allowed me to select MBR or GPT. So I opted for GPT. I tried to install Vista, and it complained again, incredibly vaguely stating something like "Does not meet the minimum criteria." lol.

I faffed about for a couple means with deleting partitions and creating partitions, even erroring out on a format. Bizarrely it then allowed me to install on the disk, but told me that it was not in the correct order. I'm taking my chances and just installing Vista 64 bit now. lol.

Obviously I'm missing something on GPT... I never had this issue before with Vista? Did they drop the enforcement of it or something?
 
so 64bit was fine but 32bit threw up errors? weird

It was a new build, I have never tried to install 32 bit on this machine. (I think you may have misunderstood).

Basically it wanted the drive formatted to GPT instead of MBR (was was a ball ache).. but even then it was being weird on the installer, and then randonly decided to work (perhaps my lack of knowledge on GPT partitions).
 
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