I have installed win10 over a dozen times on 6 different hard drives and never had this Issue, relly need help understanding what has changed. I have always booted efi, I have not formatted a disk fat32 since windows 7, why am i suddenly now unable to install windows 10 without it complaining my partition is NTFS and needs to be formatted fat32? New hard rive, ol drive doesnt matter. i neve format them. I hit new and let windows do parttion the drive how ever it wants. i hit next and i get the error message when it tries to copy files. Why has this never happened before? I am currently installed as non efi but now i cant see my old drive with all my stuff .
First things first. 1) What is the ISO that are you trying to install? Original, Untouched, which version/sku? 2) What kind of installation are you trying to do? Default, Windows To Go, Virtual Machine? 3) What kind of disk do you have? Hard disk, SSD, IDE, SATA, USB? Model and Specs? 4) Do your system support Secure and Legacy Boots? Which one are you running? * NTFS can be installed in MBR and GPT disks, but It depedends of UEFI/BIOS options. cheers
Ive tried 2 a homebrew image of redstone ent and the old ENT_LTSB. Both off flash drive. I did this twice last week with no issue. HDs vary, ive got hitachi, samsung and now a toshiba. This is just a default windows desktop install on a asus board. I dont know what secure vs legacy means. when i boot into the bios i get the option of running UEFI flash or non. I always pick UEFI. I guess what i dont get is how windows is creating partitions that it doesnt like. I have never made my own partitions or formatted them but now its seems to be an issue and I cant see where im doing anything different. I think ive noticed something just not sure what it means. in last installs I would select "new" for the drive and windows would then create 3 partitions, the main one and 2 100mb ones. Now im only seeing it make 2.
Do you have some kind a reason that you do not answer the questions raised in the previous post? How can somebody help you, if you refuse from giving information about the problem?
Use Rufus to transfer the Win10 ISO contents to your USB drive, then boot your system using the drive in UEFI (not legacy BIOS) mode. If you have no data you care about then delete all existing partitions via Win10 Setup and allow it to format as GPT and create the partitions it requires.
UEFI always has to boot from fat32 for Windows. Windows usually does this by having a separate system partition where it puts boot files. I'm pretty sure Windows needs UEFI to also be in GPT partition scheme, but it's been a long time since I've looked over the requirements.
also try different usb port.. sometimes the 3 and the hubs cause strange issue with drive letter. disable CSM/legacy boot.
Since the efi system partition has to be fat32, shouldnt windows create that? I've never created that partition or formatted it. I'm confused as to why this is never happened. I have trouble believing everyone installing win10 makes their own directories, I've never done that.
Forget the target hard disk. Is your USB drive formatted as NTFS? Format it using the options shown in the screenshot above and try Setup once more.
I tried to flash drives, one as NTFS and the other FAT32. I never tried cleaning a disk, ill try that next.
My understanding was that if I booted into UEFI mode, then any partitioning was automatically GPT. Is this not true?
The info is not clear. To boot and install UEFI/GPT, the installmedia has to be either prepared like the diskpart guys do or by rufus or just an USB thumbdrive formatted FAT32 and the iso extracted to it. What i think i read is that booting from the installmedia works but it gives an error message when the setup is at disk preparation, it can't be about NTFS because that's the standard used file system (on both UEFI/GPT and BIOS/MBR installs). Can you post an exact copy of the errormessage or better a clear picture of it?
This is the error message: (EFI partition is NTFS formatted and you need to format it by FAT32 and restart system.) You get this on the installation screen and during its first procedure "copying windows files" It fails during this and gives the message. I think I eliminated the flashdrive/iso as the problem...I used this exact same flash drive for 2 installations last week. I am beginning to wonder if it has simply been luck, that all my previous installs just happened to be fat32 ....but that doesn't explain why windows does not create the partition it needs.
The windows drive is by default always NTFS formatted. I personally think the installmedium is corrupted, i had some errors in the past too with an usb thumbdrive i reformatted over 500 times, if not more (installs didn't create the "extra" system partitions anymore) and after buying a new usb thumbdrive it all worked again. When the setup shows the partitioning screen, do you delete all partitions on the windows system drive? If so, windows will partition it using the correct scheme for either UEFI/GPT or BIOS/MBR if you have a remaining pre-partioned partition OR another physical hdd/ssd with MBR partioned partitions, it won't be able to do that.
Thanks for the help guys, finally figured it out. EFI system partition has to be fat32, didn't know that before, but you don't have to make it, windows is supposed to do that. In my case windows was only making 1 little blank partition(dont know what thats for ) It wasn't making the other because it thought I already had one, I had another HD that had a system partition, but it was ntfs. that caused the error. I unplugged that drive and install went normal.