When you arrive home from a conference (which you were, of course, smart enough to bring your Mac to), and find that your Windows laptop won’t boot because in the process of doing absolutely nothing while you were away, the hard disk failed catastrophically (grr-click, grr-click, type fail), and the other disks you have laying around all are formatted with GPT partitions, which the windows installer fails to recognize…you need to:
- Enter the repair console in the Vista boot disk
- type “diskpart” to enter the partition utility
- type “Sel disk 0″ to select the main drive in the laptop
- type “clean”
- type “exit” and try again with the installer and it will work.
I actually needed to do quite a few more things, mainly involving Google and writing run on sentences in my blog — but you get the idea.
NO NO NO! This will wipe the entire HDD – NOT just the partition. I lost data because of this.
Well, that’s to be expected, yes. There’s not way to change a disk partition structure without wiping.
Why not: window key-r
diskpart
list disk
sel disk 0
convert mbr
?
I tried Ken Emerson’s suggestion. No luck. Requests an empty GPT disk before it will convert. My drive is too big for me to back it up to another location before I wipe it. has anyone figured out how to do this without losing the data??? Or is it even possible?
The only way I have found to preserve the data is to borrow to a large disk from a friend.
Greg,
I replaced my MacBook Pro with HP Pavilion dv7. I want to use on the HP, the external WD backup, 1 terabyte external drive used for “Time Zone.” My HP laptop see the drive as:
Description Disk drive
Manufacturer (Standard disk drives)
Model WD 10EACS External USB Device
Bytes/Sector 512
Media Loaded Yes
Media Type Removable media
Partitions 2
SCSI Bus Not Available
SCSI Logical Unit Not Available
SCSI Port Not Available
SCSI Target ID Not Available
Sectors/Track 63
Size 931.51 GB (1,000,202,273,280 bytes)
Total Cylinders 121,601
Total Sectors 1,953,520,065
Total Tracks 31,008,255
Tracks/Cylinder 255
Partition Disk #2, Partition #0
Partition Size 200.00 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 20,480 bytes
Partition Disk #2, Partition #1
Partition Size 931.19 GB (999,860,912,128 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 209,735,680 bytes
The HP names it Drive G and will not address it. HP believes it to have removable media. I’m running:
windir %SystemRoot%
USERNAME SYSTEM
TRACE_FORMAT_SEARCH_PATH \\NTREL202.ntdev.corp.microsoft.com\34FB5F65-FFEB-4B61-BF0E-A6A76C450FAA\TraceFormat
TMP %SystemRoot%\TEMP
TMP %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
TMP %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp Jack-PC\Jack
TEMP %SystemRoot%\TEMP
TEMP %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
TEMP %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp Jack-PC\Jack
QTJAVA C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\lib\ext\QTJava.zip
PROCESSOR_REVISION 170a
PROCESSOR_LEVEL 6
PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER Intel64 Family 6 Model 23 Stepping 10, GenuineIntel
PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE AMD64
Platform MCD
PCBRAND Pavilion
PATHEXT .COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.MSC
Path %SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;C:\Program Files (x86)\CyberLink\Power2Go;C:\Program Files (x86)\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\Core-Static;C:\Program Files (x86)\QuickTime\QTSystem\
OS Windows_NT
OnlineServices Online Services
NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS 2
FP_NO_HOST_CHECK NO
DFSTRACINGON FALSE
ComSpec %SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe
CLASSPATH .;C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\lib\ext\QTJava.zip
Ideas appreciated
Jack Ayre:
1. Go to Start – Run (Win + R) – diskpart
2. Type in:
list disk
It will display list of all disks connected to system. Locate the WD 1TB disk by size.
3. Type in:
select disk X
where X is the number of the WD 1TB disk you obtained in (2).
4. Type in:
clean
5. Type in:
create partition primary
6. Type in:
format
7. Type in:
assign
Disk should then be ready to use with Windows.
Note that operations above will remove all data from the disk.
Jack Ayre:
1. Go to Start – Run (Win + R) – diskpart
2. Type in:
list disk
It will display list of all disks connected to system. Locate the WD 1TB disk by size.
3. Type in:
select disk X
where X is the number of the WD 1TB disk you obtained in (2).
4. Type in:
clean
5. Type in:
create partition primary
6. Type in:
format
7. Type in:
assign
Disk should then be ready to use with Windows.
Note that operations above will remove all data from the disk.