Hello, My target system is- New Gigabyte H87 UEFI motherboard New Hard Disk (1 TB) Windows 7 x64 (Ultimate) Windows Loader (Daz) What I have found in MDL- Windows Loader supports only MBR, UEFI supports only GPT. So to use Windows Loader I must use non-UEFI mode in BIOS. My query- If I simply start with booting Windows 7 DVD in non-UEFI node in BIOS, will Windows 7 installation automatically format the hard disk in NTFS? Or I have to format the hard disk in NTFS well before Windows 7 installation? Thanks & regards, Cool Guy.
Yes, just boot your install media in legacy/bios mode & your good to go. You would only have to go uefi/gpt if your boot drive was bigger than 2TB...
Windows 7, both MBR and UEFI installs, will use NTFS for the main partition. Only difference partitioning-wise between the two setups is that UEFI adds an EFI-specific FAT(32?) partition for EFI-related things, and that it is marked as boot. In order to avoid any weird partitioning issues though, I usually do a diskpart clean on the drive I want to use before installing Windows to it (Shift + F10 during beginning Windows install screen), that way, Windows is allowed to do whatever it wants to partition the drive. As for the actual diskpart commands: Code: Shift + F10 diskpart list disk select disk # clean exit exit # = the disk you want to install Windows to clean = wipes the disk of partitions exit = leaves diskpart and then Command Prompt