"the selected disk is of the gpt partition style" upon installation

[Mustey]

I am writing this from my phone as I am stuck in the win7 installation. I deleted the partition carrying the amazing win 8.1 and when I thought I'll just chop it up and install win7, it says it has other plans. what do I need to do to let me install win7?

[Mustey]

cleaned the disk with diskpart... I thought selecting disk 0 would leave the 14gb disk 1 (the recovery partition I guess) alone but it got cleaned too... Hope I don't end up needing it!

[TheProfitible · Accepted solution]

When installing newer versions of windows it is impotant to understand that there are two main formats for harddrives and there are also two forms of booting.

UEFI Booting:

Newer computers come with what is known as a uefi booting interface. This allows for additional features such as secure boot as well as HP UEFI support environment which allows you to test various hardwares components without booting into an operating system.

UEFI operating systems use the GUID Partition Table (GPT) disk format which allows for more partitions as well as larger harddrive capacity.

BIOS Booting:

Older computers have the BIOS which contans the basic settings as well as the time and date of the onboard system clock. Features such as virtualization or CPU over-clocking (as available on selected hardware) are able to be turned on and off in the BIOS. Most of the features of the BIOS have now been replicated in the newer UEFI boot.

BIOS based operating systems use the Master Boot Record (MBR) disk format which allows support for legacy operationg systems.

What does this mean:

In order to downgrade your unit from windows 8.1 to windows 7 you can either 

1. Format the Disk to the MBR format.  (Make sure to backup your data before you do this)
2. Boot your windows 7 installation media in UEFI mode (Ensure your UEFI boot mode is set to UEFI Hybrid for maximum compatibility)

Diskpart selects the physical disk rather than the partitions so when you convert between MBR and GPT (and vice-versa) you will lose the recovery partition. Provided you have HP/Windows recovery media you shouldn't experience too much difficulty with recovering your computer.

Hope this has assisted you and best of luck with your Re-Installation

[Mustey]

Good stuf!
So far, the installation went well. The machine is performing on the top of it's class (according to novabench).
Won't be looking back at 8.1... Well... Maybe if win10 is worth it and I can upgrade from 8.1...

Thanks!

[apkplus]

You can install Windows 7 on it.

This error is due to the installation media or installation drive problem.

If you delete allt he partitions, or if you clean your drive, you can solve this issue, but you will lose all your data.

BUT you can solve this issue without deleting any data on your partition 

Without Data Lose, Solve Error: Windows Cannot be Installed to this MBR Partition