One of my 1TB drives had outdated image files and some odds and ends on it. I deleted all the unnecessary stuff and moved the rest to another drive/partition. I then used Diskpart to clean the drive (removes all partition info and data) and then convert it to GPT. I used the newly converted GPT drive as target for fresh images of all my partitions on the other two 1TB drives. I’ve got about 1.5TB of stuff (including OS, etc.) but the images compress enough that they all fit on the one GPT drive.
After making current backups of all requisite partitions (I don’t need to backup my Windows 7 and Windows 8 DVD’s, just copy them in the new partitions), I’ve converted another 1TB drive to gpt. Windows 8 (and the system) is still MBR. Once I get all the hardware together, with the UEFI motherboard, the fun begins.
Having opted for the ATX motherboard instead of the µATX (more functionality and expansion capability), I needed a larger case and PSU, and ordered those, as well. The last bits arrived yesterday, and I got into the hardware end of it. I have everything installed in the case, and the system will boot to the UEFI BIOS.
I hit a snag in trying to install Windows 7 Ultimate. My plan was to install Windows 7 in UEFI, then boot my TBWinRE rescue environment and restore my Windows 8.1 Pro to the Windows 7 partition, and proceed from there. Evidently I’m hitting some unforeseen snag in the installation. On the first reboot, Windows fails to boot, Windows Repair can’t repair it, then on reboot the system tries to install Windows 8. I think it’s seeing the Windows 8 MBR HDD, and making assumptions.
I cleaned the Windows 8 MBR HDD and converted it to GPT, but still no luck in getting Windows 7 to boot after installation. I cleaned the HDD again, converted to GPT again, then booted the Windows 7 installation USB stick instead of creating the EFI and MSR partitions first. In the installation routine, when it came to select a place to install, I hit Shift + F10 to get a command prompt, then opened DISKPART and created the EFI and MSR partitions. I then created a 60GB primary partition and pointed Windows 7 toward that for installation. That worked.
After getting Windows 7 up and running, I skipped all the updating and such, booted my TBWinRE USB stick, and restored my Windows 8.1 Pro. Then it wouldn’t boot. I gave up after a couple more tries. I found a post by Alex (it’s the first answer) on Superuser.com that saved my bacon. I opened DISKPART again and assigned a drive letter to the EFI partition. I went into EFI\Microsoft\Boot, ran bootrec /fixboot, renamed BCD to BCD.bak, and created a new BCD store using Alex’s commandline:
bcdboot c:\Windows /l en-us /s b: /f ALL
I rebooted, and there was Windows 8.1!
Now I’ve got to slog back through restoring all those fresh drive images to newly created partitions on my HDD’s; create a partition, use Image For Windows to restore the image file, go into Disk Management to get the letters straight, then do another one. But I’m liking the new system, and Image For Windows saves me the chore of formatting the partitions.
