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Windows 7 MBR to UEFI trouble.


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#1
For the love of sod.

For the love of sod.

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Hullo, lads.  Just as the title says, I have Windows 7 installed in the MBR fashion and have attempted to convert it to GPT(UEFI), which has not gone well.  First, these are my specs (custom-built PC):

Operating System:  Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
CPU:  AMD FX-8320, Vishera 32nm Technology (29 °C)
RAM:  16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 577MHz (11-11-11-28)
Motherboard:  ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. M5A97 R2.0 (Socket 942)    (34 °C)
Graphics:  2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti (Gigabyte)    (31 °C)
Storage:  2794GB Seagate ST3000DM001-1CH166 ATA Device (SATA)    (35 °C)
    746GB ASDK ST3000DM001-1CH166 ATA Device (partition of the above Seagate HDD, made by Asus Disk Unlocker in order to read above 2TB, meaning that though Speccy sees the 3TB, Windows reads only 2TB without Disk Unlocker, one of the reasons I'm converting to GPT)
Optical Drives:  ATAPI iHAS124 W ATA Device
Audio:  ASUS Xonar DG Audio Device

 

My current situation is that I can-not boot from the HDD, and am using the Midori browser on an optical disc to write this.

 

First, I backed up the whole system image on an external drive.

 

Next, I found this page:

http://superuser.com...efi-from-legacy

 

I attempted using gptgen as per the instructions posted by nathanbedford.

 

 

Unfortunately, when I got to step 5 it told me to try this command, which the command line did not recognise:  gptgen.exe -w \\.\physicaldrive0

 

When that didn't work, I moved on to Nehal J. Wani's instructions, and I got to step 5 there as well, which says to boot from the system recovery disc.  Well, I tested that disc before doing any of this but now it says it won't work with this version of Windows, so I'm stuck.

Any advice?  Thanks very much.


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#2
For the love of sod.

For the love of sod.

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Got this sorted using this video:


Nehal J Wani made it and he's really good about making sure things work out for people that are using his guides, so if you have any trouble just contact him.

First, I wiped my disc, made it MBR again, and restored back-up system image on there.

Then I got that video up on another device and followed it with my PC.

In my case I had another problem which was that Windows 7's install disc had an outdated version of bcdboot.exe, so I couldn't do the final step.  Nehal really worked with me, and he linked me an updated version which I put on a flash drive, and we used the version on the flash drive to make the final command work, and that was it.  Took us a couple of days but I hope that now that you've read this it won't take you more than a few minutes.

Bear in mind that the missing command was only missing because it was Windows 7.  It's present for 8 and 10, but you can't just use an 8 or 10 install disc to do this on Windows 7 unfortunately, or at least, for whatever reason, I couldn't.  Best of luck, everyone.


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#3
louuu

louuu

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hi, I have a question for you.  I currently have a 2tb hard drive in my dell xps8500 computer running legacy/mbr boot.  my system is uefi capable and my hard drive is getting full.  I would like to upgrade to a 4tb hard drive and see the entire 4tb as one drive and I know I need to boot up in gpt/uefi as mbr/legacy has a 2tb maximum limit.  my question is this, will following this video allow me to copy/clone my drive AND convert it to gpt/uefi mode so that I can go from my 2tb legacy/mbr boot to a 4tb gpt/uefi boot WITHOUT losing my data so that I don't have to reinstall my operating system and all the software programs all over again?  thank you.


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#4
For the love of sod.

For the love of sod.

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Hi there.  I don't remember the video too well but in my situation, I was already using a drive with 3TB capacity and wanted to go beyond 2TB and add more partitions (another MBR limitation), and I don't believe the video covered any cloning.  So, you can pretty easily just clone to the new 4TB drive and then start following the video.  Just note that I needed to use an updated version of the command prompt for Windows 7, to use the /f switch in the command I needed, which was

bcdboot X:\Windows /l en-us /s Z: /f ALL

 

Good luck.  Let me know if you have any more questions.


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#5
louuu

louuu

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thank you, I appreciate your reply.  have a nice day.


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