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I have a Lenovo G500 laptop and I've had a dual boot of Ubuntu 14.10 and Windows 8.1 for a while. I decided to upgrade Windows 8.1 to the Windows 10 technical preview, however it's fairly buggy so I tried to move back to Windows 8.1 only the Windows rollback feature in the boot manager experienced an error:

here is an image.

While I was googling, I thought to myself that why not just try to go back to Windows 7 since I have an extra license lying around and would prefer this much more than Windows 8.1.

So I am now experiencing the "Windows cannot be installed on this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style" problem, as I can run the Windows 7 installation but all partitions on my hard drive say this or similar, and are not made available for installation.

After doing some research, I've found that I may just have to convert my hard drive to be MBR rather than GPT, but is it possible to do so without affecting the Ubuntu partition? From my understanding, converting will erase all contents on the disk, not just the desired partitions.

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  • You do not need to switch to MBR to accomplish what you want, switching, is problematic the you realize
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jul 11, 2015 at 23:24
  • If it is unnecessary to make the switch to MBR, what do you recommend? I am unable to select any partition in the boot manager, and when attempting formatting of any kind the error seems to persist.
    – James
    Commented Jul 11, 2015 at 23:26
  • The media you are using is EFI bootable, and you are selecting that mode, to boot that that media right?
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jul 12, 2015 at 3:08
  • because the previous OS is windows 8.1, I needed to select legacy OS in the bios.
    – James
    Commented Jul 12, 2015 at 5:58
  • Your reasons for selecting legacy os, does not make sense, Windows 8.1 fully supports EFI. You asked what I recommended, I already have, install Windows in non-legacy mode.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jul 12, 2015 at 6:12

1 Answer 1

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Windows 7 should install on a GPT partition but you must boot in UEFI mode on the install DVD and you should use X64 version.

If still not working:

You can use use a cloning tool like clonezilla or Redo backup to backup your linux partition on a external hard drive for example.

Then simply delete all partitions of the drive and convert it to MBR, install windows and finally restore the backup of your linux partition on the main drive.

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  • Needs to boot in legacy mode and set the priority for UEFI first, but this resolved my issue.
    – James
    Commented Jul 12, 2015 at 6:25

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