UEFI GPT woes

DragonHunter · 8 Jul 2013 at 15:36

Hi All, *cheery face*

Ok, so to cut a long story short, I just swapped an old M4A785 Motherboard for a new M5A97 Motherboard (both were from Asus) and now windows is not booting. On the repair installation page the option to do a repair installation isn't available because of the following message.

*Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI sysrems Windows can only be installed to GPT disks.*

Now, the easy choice would be to re-format, install and go from there, but the whole point of the upgrade was the old Mobo died so backups are rather out of date (self inflicted i know).

So, are there any alternatives to losing every iota of un-backed up data on C:\ ?

And also, how am I going to be able to access the information on the other physical drive, and 2nd partition of my primary drive?

Thanks

nightmare99 · 8 Jul 2013 at 16:16

Its sounds like you are booting the DVD in UEFI mode, when you power the PC on bring up the boot menu (err F11 or F12 I think on ASUS) and you should see two entries fro your optical drive one will be UEFI and the other legacy so select the one that is not UEFI.

DragonHunter · 8 Jul 2013 at 16:32

oh and then once I do that I'll be able to repair the installation in legacy mode?
Is there a way to select the HDD for legacy operation? I've had to resort to installing windows on a really old 75Gb Raptor so won't be able to get back into the *BIOS* until that's finished.

Thanks for your help anyway.

nightmare99 · 8 Jul 2013 at 17:54

oh and then once I do that I'll be able to repair the installation in legacy mode?

How do you intend on doing a repair? By selecting an upgrade installation? If so you can only do this from within windows and not from booting off DVD/USB.