Windows 10 installation... MBR vs EFI

amdfan

amdfan

amdfan

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Was hoping for some advice on performing a clean windows 10 installation. A bit of background info... my MoBo is UEFI and I have two hard drives. One drive is a SSD and the other is 4 HDDs in RAID10.

Historically I have always formatted the SSD and installed windows on that, leaving the HDD's untouched. I have tried to do the same again with a clean install of Windows 10 but I am running into some issues.

When selecting the drive to install Windows on this is what I see...
http://1drv.ms/1R9lnIm

You will see that I cannot install to drive 1 as "the selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks." Could anyone please provide pointers on how to overcome this?

Secondly, I am unsure why drive 0 (my storage raid configuration) has a MSR. Is there any reason why I should want to delete this and extend the storage partition. I have no interest in encryption etc.

Kind regards,
Ed
 
Last edited:
I cannot see anything? Did you put a pic?

Anyway, I am flying blind-ish, but a few tips to try out that may help?

Firstly, I myslef think that EFI is a bit of a waste of time really. Its more hassle than its worth.

Disconnect the RAID drives, so that you only have the SSD connected.

If you absolutely MUST have EFI, then the installation media needs to be a GTP disk too... I know that when I needed to do it, I had to make the USB Flash Drive a GTP Disk in order to write the installation files onto that, to get it to install onto the Disk.

All you need to do, is kill off the partition(s) on the MBR disk ,and make a new one ( Windows install will automagically make the extra GTP ones for you ) - I hope? LOL

Also, your BIOS is seemingly set to EFI mode and so that is why it is booting into it.

As I said, its more hassle than its worth, and for me, some boards are simple to use it, and some boards are not so simple... Dont know why, but I have failed entirely to use it on 2 of my boards and yet I have never had any issues with some others... I just dont bother with it anymore.
 
Thanks for the reply. Not sure what's up with the pic... I have just changed how it's shared so should be visible now.

Bizarrely the system drive doesn't have a partition, but my storage drive does. Issue one in my eyes is to install Windows 10 on drive 1.

If I did want to use UEFI, what is the best approach to convert it from MBR to GPT?
 
Ok, the MSR Partition is normal with a GTP Disk... Leave it alone.

The other one however, is very strange yes, there seems to be a partition that has simply gone awol?

What it looks like however, is that you have previously installed Windows, and it has the boot on the SSD, but the rest of the install on the RAID.

Might I ask... this 3GB partition,. has 2GB free... Did you just have a single C: drive on that PC when it was running? That would explain a few things.

Like I said... I would remove the RAID Disks so you only have the SSD and see what that shows you?

You have a 120GB SSD that has a 30GB System on it, and what I would do, is redo the install and then wipe that partition, and indeed any others from the SSD and then, rather than just start the install, make a partition using the full space of the disk that it shows you, and see what partitions get made automatically... You should have a couple extra of course, ( or just one extra if its an MBR disk ) and so install to that.

I know that with the setup seeing the RAID Disks before the SSD, that can be an issue causer right there, so installing with only the SSD connected will remove any possible chance of there being any cross over of files.

Let us know how it goes.
 
Disconnect the raid drives first

If you are set on uefi installing then go boot into the installer in uefi mode.

Get to the point where you enter the CD key.

Shift f10

Diskpart

List disk

Select disk #
(where # is the ssd disk number)

Clean (THIS WILL WIPE THE DRIVE - BACKUP!)

Concert gpt

Exit

Exit

The installation should then work as normal..
 
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