Difficulties partitioning my new HDD. Faulty HD?

f14tomcat said:

Is there any setting in your BIOS to boot "Legacy EFI" or some wording to that effect?

Rebooting my PC now and checking

EDIT: nope. however it's an old MB released years before UEFI came around so I'm not surprised.

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spunk said:

You cannot install Windows on a GPT Initialized drive in a Non UEFI Bios. You can use it for a storage drive, but to install Windows on a standard MBR Bios, you need to Initialize the drive MBR. and you cannot create a partition larger the 2TB. in MBR

Well that settles it.
I will go ahead and start the installation on the disk using the MBR format file then.

Thanks for clearing that up for us, appreciate it.

There is a way of installing legacy bios on a 4TB drive and use all the drive space.

You format the drive as GPT but create a mbr virtual hard drive, and install Windows into the mbr hard drive.

I do this all the time, as it is easier to boot vhd on HyperV as a gen 1 install.

Hey guys,

Turns out I still cannot install Windows 10 on my 4TB drive formatted as MBR.
I cleaned the disk with diskpart.
Converted the disk to MBR

I checked with my partition tool and and it sees the disk as MBR

I boot windows 10 install

When it asks me where do I want to install windows I have

Drive 0 unallocated space 2048GB
Drive 0 unallocated space 1678GB

I don't create no partition anything and select the 2048GB space and click on next

"we couldn't install windows in the location you chose. Please check your media drive. Here's more info about what happened: 0x80300024"

I'm out of idea. The USB drive is brand new USB 3.1 speed. I also tested with an older USB flash drive and same issue so I don't think the issue is the flash drive.

I think the issue is that I'm trying to install windows 10 on a 4TB HDD not supported by the MBR format.

It doesn't work either when I create a 500GB unallocated space from the start of the disk.

I'm out of ideas

Arese said:

I'm out of ideas

You are just wasting disk space when trying to use a >2TB drive as the system drive on a legacy BIOS computer. Buy a drive no larger than 2TB to use as the system drive on a legacy BIOS computer, and use the 4TB drive as a second, data only, drive.

I'm going to try these fixes listed out here
How to Fix Error 0x80300024 When Installing Windows - Appuals.com

First one is to remove any unnecessary HDD connected to the system.
I do have a 2nd 4TB drive connected to my PC. It is formatted in GPT, no windows installed on it it's just for storage.

This is maybe what confusing the windows install process.



EDIT It works! I removed my 2nd HDD. Cleaned the disk to start from a fresh base. Created a 500GB primary partition from the start of the disk and this time windows 10 install started.

Never struggled that much to install a windows!

Thanks everyone

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NavyLCDR said:

You are just wasting disk space when trying to use a >2TB drive as the system drive on a legacy BIOS computer. Buy a drive no larger than 2TB to use as the system drive on a legacy BIOS computer, and use the 4TB drive as a second, data only, drive.

I'm not wasting space, it's just split into 2 partitions instead of having only 1 partition in GPT mode. See above posts with the size details for each partition windows 10 sees

Arese said:

I'm not wasting space, it's just split into 2 partitions instead of having only 1 partition in GPT mode. See above posts with the size details for each partition windows 10 sees

You might want to look at that drive again in disk management. If that 4 TB drive is MBR partitioned, you are going see a large chunk of it marked as unallocated space.

cereberus said:

There is a way of installing legacy bios on a 4TB drive and use all the drive space.

You format the drive as GPT but create a mbr virtual hard drive, and install Windows into the mbr hard drive.

I do this all the time, as it is easier to boot vhd on HyperV as a gen 1 install.

I don't see how that is possible on a pure legacy BIOS computer system. Legacy BIOS requires a primary partition to be marked as active to boot from and load the BCD. It is the BCD file that would then tell the bootloader to load the OS from the virtual hard drive file. On a GPT partitioned drive it is impossible to mark a partition as active to boot from.