Issue installing windows 7 on a gpt drive

[loverofcats]

Hey there, I am having a problem with my windows 7 64 bit machine.

It first started out with a possible driver issue to a power outage for all of 30 seconds. I will bypass that issue however as reinstalling windows is my final result.

The problem I am having is this. When I attempt to install windows 7 from Win PE, it says it cannot install to the gpt disk. I know my machine must have uefi and boots in it because of the drive being gpt. How do I solve this? I'd love to get this machine working again.

Another note. When I formatted the win pe on rufus, rather put the image on, I could not change from mbr to gpt. I don't want to convert the drive for an install because it is an ssd.

If I have to go into firmware on boot for the bios, what am I looking for if i need to change anything?

I am totally blind, and there is no speech in bios, so I am having a sighted person read me the screen when in the boot menu etc. I wasn't seeing any uefi copy of my sandisk cruiser glide, just the sandisk without uefi next to it. Under uefi options all it gave me was windows boot manager.

If I could get a description of the menus that would be wonderful. so I could hopefully do what I need to do without eyes.

Thank you so much for any help you can provide.

[itsmyname]

Can you connect the SSD as a secondary disk-drive in another computer?

Then, run the DISKPART command-line utility program.

Enter SHOW VOLUME -- to list all the available volumes.

Enter SELECT VOLUME N -- to focus on the volume for the SSD. Be sure that N is the correct volume.

Enter HELP CLEAN -- to get information on the CLEAN command. It will remove all formatting-information from the selected volume. This leaves the SSD as completely unformatted -- readying it to be formatted as GPT, when back into the first computer.

When done with the CLEAN command, use the EXIT command to quit from DISKPART.

[loverofcats]

Hey there,

Thank you for your response. unfortunately, the only other available machine I could hook the ssd to is not really doable. The only other available desktop is my old Imac bootcamped with windows. My significant other also has the same sort of machine, but I couldn't do it that way I don't think. also no enclosure.

I am totally blind, so I also do not feel comfortable poking about inside the computer's case because I can't see what things connect where.. I did some contacting, and I will be receiving oem disks. So we can see if that will help. I do have eyes to read me that, thankfully.

I do have a talking win PE, the Windows PE with speech capabilities but not sure if I could run that from flash drive and pop the disk in so I could install windows independently.

thanks for your help! grins

[WAWood]

@loverofcats 

This is an extremely difficult situation to address -- even for a sighted person -- so it's going to be a nightmare for someone to assist you in this because there is so much we do not know and have to guess about.

You say your PC boots into UEFI and when you look under the Boot Devices, it does not show your Win7 USB stick. Is that correct?

One very likely reason is Secure Boot -- as that will prevent ANY USB sticks from showing up under the Boot Devices menu, even if they were formatted for UEFI booting.  I don't have access to a UEFI PC, so sorry, I can not provide you the screen information.  But, you would first have to go into the UEFI settings and ensure that Secure Boot is disabled.

Then -- reinsert the USB stick and reboot.  If the stick shows up under the non-UEFI section, then at least the PC can now see and read it.

To change the USB stick to UEFI bootable, we have to know what is on it and how it was made.  Normally, folks download something known as an ISO file and then use a utility to create a bootable USB stick from that. A utility often used is RUFUS and you can get it from here:  https://rufus.ie/en_US/

The nice thing about RUFUS is that with an ISO file, you can then create UEFI-bootable USB stick by selecting that option on the screen.  If you have an ISO file of Win7, you could then use RUFUS to create a UEFI-bootable USB stick -- and you could then boot using that stick to install Win7 on the PC.

If all you have is a USB stick with Win7 already on it, that is MUCH more difficult because you would have to use a blank USB stick, make it UEFI-bootable, and then copy the right files to it to the right directories -- and since I have not done that, I can not provide you instructions for doing that.