Answering some questions: 1TB isn't exactly large. Windows 7 cannot be installed on exFAT. Windows 7 can only be installed on NTFS, as it actively uses features (hardlinks, junctions, journaling) exFAT doesn't support. The last Windows that could be installed on FAT(32) was XP. The wasted space depends on the cluster size (chosen when formatting). A file can only occupy one or multiple clusters, the remaining space in the last cluster not covered by the file data is wasted, that's called slack space. The larger the cluster size, the higher the slack and thus the wasted space. exFAT tends to be formatted with rather big cluster sizes by default, and quickly fills up when there are many small files stored on it. Example: A file with a size of 1 Byte occupies 4 KiB if the cluster size is 4K. It will occupy a whopping 128 KiB if the cluster size is 128K. And exFAT supports cluster sizes of up to 32 MegaBytes. Please note that this does not apply to NTFS, as very small files on NTFS can be stored in the MFT in their entirety, without taking up additional space. So, NTFS has even less waste than mathematically possible. For disks larger than 2TiB, GTP is mandatory. MBR does simply not support addressing any space beyond 2TiB. You could set the HPA (Host Protected Area) to 2GiB, wasting half of the disk space, and partition the rest as MBR. 8TB can only be partitioned as GPT. For filesystem, use NTFS or ReFS, both are resilient to corruption to some degree. Corruption could have many causes. Check the RAM. Check the controller, it could have degraded due to capacitor plague, for example. Check the BIOS it could be too old to properly support disks larger than 2TiB and thus GPT.
I think you can install win7 in a native VHD residing on a fat32 or exfat w/o any problem, also there were experiments to install win7 natively on fat32, not for faint of hearth but, not impossible. We have always to remember that fat32 and fat64 (exfat) are way less flexible and robust than ntfs, but are also way faster and easier to manage. Again that's just the short answer, the answer which is good enough for any situation, the answer that MS would provide to avoid to keep track of dozens of different scenarios depending the bios implementation, the wanted partition layout, the size of physical sectors and the size of logical sectors. The long answer is way more complex, and the actual limit may be 2TB, 3TB or even 16TB depending the combination of all the ingredients involved.
Carlos Detweiller Thank You for replaiyng, and Yes you are correct , when I installed win 7 on 1 TB GPT disk I also installed a 4 TB "NEW" Western Digits for backup and save data to it that also became corrupt I know very little about computers but You are right about installing on system NTFS as I aslso read on the web In regard to other systems and formats are too tecnical for me to deal with and I do not understand how to deal with, I intend to format 4 TB HDD in 4 Partition and the 8 TB for backups and storage my question and problem is Why ? the HDD with MBR (200/ 300 GB) have turned all bed by connecting to GPT system? never seen any other fawlts problems beside the HDD failing and not used for very long time when originally connected I can be Wrong I do not believe the computer is the problem I installed New 8 GB RAM at the same time I installed win 7 GPT, all HDD are of MBR small size up to 500 GB max the most, that is why I dont believ is the cause you mentioned I may be Wrong! I want to backup all the old drives to 1, 2 big drivers like the 8 TB What is the reason ? HOW to fix, prevent it? what system to use Any suggestion recommandation Much appreciated Thank you Maybe, but, do you really want to go down that rabbit hole? NO I don't I do not know how to!
Just Ontrack. IIRC Kroll bought them sometimes in the 2000s, when the usage of the SW declined, and the profits declined ad well.
Thank You for your help and support much appreciated, I will investigate /tray the suggestions Thank You
George...sorry for late reply. Been under the weather the past month and progressing slowly. Glad to hear you've had success. Are you posting elsewhere about your work on the site? I am still interested in getting W7 running on my system but have been spending all my time getting W10 working and stable. Since I last posted, I have installed an Asus GTX 1650 video card but it takes up two slots even though it is inserted into only one slot. It is sitting so close to a spare PCIe x 4 slot that I'll need to devise a method of inserting an expansion device to get another PCIe card in there. As Carlos Detweiller pointed out, the extra PCIe x 16 slot does not work with normal PCI cards. I want to find out what the difference is because equivalent sound cards, some with PCI and some with PCIe, are arranged so that the PCIe cards will work fine in a PCIe x 4 slot whereas the PCI cards require an entire PCI x 16 slot. It has occurred to me that the newer PCIe standard uses serial whereas PCI used parallel busses. Don't know, but if anyone does, I am interested in an explanation. There are adapters available that will convert an ordinary PCI cards to a PCIe slot but I understand that such conversions sometimes don't work because the driver hardware has issues with the conversion. Since Daniel K was able to solve a similar issue with Creative cards, I am sure such driver problems could be overcome. So, I have W10 up and running smoothly, up to date and pruned wrt to its spyware. In a bit, I'll try running W7 with altered USB drivers that allow it to run on the B-360M. The B-760M-C mobo fits nicely into a micro-ATX case and its BIOS does have CSM capabilities. Its much like the B-360M but the layout is better. One major advantage is being able to use a mouse in BIOS. The mobo also has one serial port. I have yet to solve my PCI sound card problem but I have found that Creative built good cards in the X-Fi class, like the Titanium sound card that works off a PCIe slot. Also, they put out the older Audigy card in a revamped card with a PCIe format. For those wondering why I use older sound cards, those cards have an on-board hardware synthesizer that converts MIDI to audio without needing to use processor cycle on a software plugin to do the same. Both the Titanium X-Fi and the Audigy have those on-board processors. If a musician wants to compose music in a software scoring program, or even a sequencer like Cakewalk/Sonar, it is necessary to write in the MIDI format, which stores entered notes as scale notes, like the C note in the scale, as a number between 1 and 128. Then it stores information as to note relative volume and how hard the key was struck on a keyboard, or on a drum. It can also store info about key sustain, which is how long the key is held, as well as note tonal bending. MIDI information contains no audio so it cannot be heard. Therefore a means is required to convert the note information to audio. Without a sound card with a built in hardware synthesizer, that is not possible unless an app (plugin) is available to do such a conversion. However, each such app requires processor time and the danger here is the delay introduced as each note is processed sequentially by the processor. For some strange reason, modern sound cards no longer provide such onboard synths. Rather, they have focused on sound effects for gamers. Anyway, George, if there's any info you need, let me know.
@George King...George...finally got around to trying W7 on the new mobo. It posts OK, probably bcause I have modded USB drivers, but freezes with a BSOD shortly after the logo appears. The error is 0x7b and seems to indicate a problem with the ACPI driver.
George...I had W7 running fine on my B360M with the standard acpi.sys. All I needed were modded USB drivers. It's been a while since I looked at this problem, I need to have a look at what is missing in my current acpi.sys. @canonkong indicated issues with multiple core processors.
@gordo999 Im booting Windows 7 installer without issues on B360, of course its XP2ESD installer. It have dynamic ACPI patch and ported drivers. I mean compiled StorAhci as W7 target, USB3..
George...thanks for reply. I am doing things the hard way. My W7 disk is full of apps and info I cannot afford to re-install. So, I am looking to get files like StorAHCI working on W7 so I can boot into the system. I am getting a BSOD with a stop 7B which usually means the current drivers in W7 are not being recognized. It has been a long time since I did this with XP and I am trying to refresh my memory. I don't know exactly what can be discussed at MDL but there is an entire thread on modded W10 drivers for older chipsets. Of course, the mods were done elsewhere and not on MDL. I understand the general guidelines that cracks cannot be posted and I am OK with that. Could someone possibly offer advice as to how deeply modding of drivers can be discussed. As I see it, Microsoft has abandoned users of XP and Win7 and they began to do that well before they stopped support for W7. For example, they failed to issue USB 3 drivers that would allow W7 to run on gen 8 mobos. They had thought about releasing them and changed their minds. When people began modding USB drivers to get W7 working on those chipsets, Microsoft cried foul. That strikes me as being eminently unfair.
Managed to get W7 to the desktop on my new Asus B760M (Raptor Lake chipset). It seems stable so far but I have no USB and the User logon is not available. Have to use Admin logon. Any suggestions re USB? I'll work it out eventually but no point re-inventing wheel if others have an answer. BTW...this is not a fresh install, I have far too many older apps on my W7 install to do that at the moment.
@gordo999 Im investigating currently drivers support in W7 for XP2ESD. For example, on my B360 I can boot Windows 7 x64 which contains patched acpi (dynamic patch), usb3 (Daniels_k package), nvme (w7 update), storhaci (Kai compiled for W7 target). And it boots into installer without issues. But when I try same process in x86 it's unbootable. Reall interesting. In past I was thinking from USB x86 VM testing in Vista same usb3 driver have this issue. According to working XP x86 on same board I ques I need to try port usb3 for 7 x86 myself to see how it goes. I think thats only difference. Btw, I will PM you testing image to see if you can boot same installer based on 7 x64 in CSM on your new B760 board EDIT: Seems like it's not related to ported USB3 driver. Interesting is I have same issue when I'm booting using USB2 ports. No idea where to start right now. Same process is used to prepare Windows 7 installer for x86 and x64 just different architecture. I need to dig more about it.
Hi..thanks for reply. I have CSM enabled in BIOS but I should take a closer look at this. It's been a while since I sat down and reviewed the differences. The graphics card is an Asus GTX 1650, which is working with Nvidia drivers on W10 but in W7 it works with full 1980 x 1080 resolution but that is likely SVGA since I have not tried to load drivers on W7. My CSM settings are as follows.... -Boot Device Control = UEFI and Legacy Oprom -Boot From Storage Devices = UEFI only -Boot from PCI-E/PCI Expansion Devices = Legacy only I had no idea what to choose for the last two because it is not clear what is meant by storage devices. Is that disk drives and USB drives? Seems my SATA drives use UEFI but maybe that's AHCI. Confusion and bit of brain damage. Not enough time thus far to sort it all out. Any advice is welcome. Also confused about boot from PCIe/PCI devices. Seems I don't use that.
Don't understand why there should be much difference between x86 and x64. The architecture is similar and the only difference I have seen tracing through x86 code and x64 code is the length of the number of bytes used. I am sure you know all this stuff, I am just reviewing so we are on the same page. The architecture has to be similar because the processor calls the shots. In a processor, as you know, there is an AX, BX, CX, and DX basic register setup and that's for 16-bit architecture in x86. For 32-bit x86 you have EAX, EBX, ECX, and EDX. For 64-bit it becomes RAX, RBX, RCX, and RDX, The same registers in function but different number of bytes that can be processed. 32-bit x86 should run on a 64-bit x64 architecture but the opposite is obviously not true.. Couple of things come to mind...I am sure you are aware of this stuff...just thinking out loud... -How far does the boot go before it stalls? Windows usually starts in a DOS-like real mode environment before switching to a protected-memory environment like Windows. Furthermore, the boot code can be in 32-bit even if the OS running is in 64-bit code. Is it possible that some of the boot code you use is code that cannot be read by an x86 system? Is there is something in your boot sector that is not allowing x86 to run? If the x86 reaches a window stage, then BSODs or freezes, it has already reached protected-mode. Does it just stall with a cursor bar blinking in the top right corner? That might indicate the OS is not recognized. -If you are using EFI that is x64, is the boot software on disk x86? -if this is related to XP, you need a boot.ini file in the C:\ drive otherwise the window loader can't recognize it. Win 7 uses a different booting system. Of course, x64 would not run either. I have encountered similar problems trying to run Hiren's ver.15.2 on the B360M. At first I thought it was about the USB and SATA drivers but apparently it has something to do with the newer boot systems. Last night, I could not run Hiren's x64 based on a PE system. My mobo won't run several PE-based disks. The B360M runs the PE-based stuff but not the B760M. There are so many issues to think about.