can't install win7 - GPT drive

[jonasolof]

Laptop is HP pavillon 6d with pentium dual core T4200, ram is 4 GB, Bios F.12. Old HDD failed and we got a new one, 500 GB sata, as the old one. I put it in a win7 desktop and formatted it to NTFS as a single partition for the whole voleume. Probably it then automatically was formatted as a secondary HDD. I then put the formatted HDD into the laptop.

When I try to make a clean install of windows 7 home premium, the installation process reports that windows can't be installed on neither the small nor the large partition (funny, I didn't intend to make two partitions...). There is lots of info on GPT and windows 7 but none that in a straightforward way explains what to do in this trivial situation. How could I proceed?

 

[pbcopter]

I would delete the volumes from that new drive and put it in the laptop and then install Windows 7.
The install works fine with an unallocated, new hardrive and you can also partition it during the install if you desire.

 

[bobkn]

Laptop is HP pavillon 6d with pentium dual core T4200, ram is 4 GB, Bios F.12. Old HDD failed and we got a new one, 500 GB sata, as the old one. I put it in a win7 desktop and formatted it to NTFS as a single partition for the whole voleume. Probably it then automatically was formatted as a secondary HDD. I then put the formatted HDD into the laptop.

When I try to make a clean install of windows 7 home premium, the installation process reports that windows can't be installed on neither the small nor the large partition (funny, I didn't intend to make two partitions...). There is lots of info on GPT and windows 7 but none that in a straightforward way explains what to do in this trivial situation. How could I proceed?

Unless your laptop has an EFI (extensible firmware interface) rather than the standard BIOS (using an MBR), you can't use a GPT as a bootable drive. As far as I know, only Intel-based Macintosh PCs commonly come with an EFI.

I guess that you need to delete the existing partitions and set the drive up again using the Win7 install DVD.

 

[Night Hawk]

Welcome to SF! jonasolof

On looking at this I can point out that when moving the drive into the other desktop you likely went into the Disk Management and saw the new volume wizard there correct?

When that is first seen the default item will be the one for MBR(Master Boot Record) not the GUID Partition Table. That seems to be where the mistake was made by selecting that rather then leaving it at the default mbr option.

The attached image will show how the two options appear when first seen. At this point simply following the advice given so far will see 7 go on without problems.