- Jan 23, 2013
- 22
- 0
- 18,510
Okay, I have an Asus g46VW that I recently purchased. I absolutely hate Win8, and have been set on downgrading to Win7 pro. Since laptop manufactures decided that optical drives are obsolete, even on gaming pc's, I went out and purchased an external dvd rom. I had to disable UEFI, secure boot, and usb 3.0 in the BIOS to even get the computer to recognize the drive as a bootable device. I am omitting the hours of troubleshooting I had to go through with bizarre errors to even get the installation to run, because I don't think they are relevant, but microsoft really does not make it easy to downgrade.
I soon realized the Win7 would not install on a GPT formatted drive, and running elevated command prompt during install would not let me use diskpart to manually change the drive type to MBR. The drive was broken into a SYSTEM, RECOVERY, OS, and DATA partitions. I was unable to format any of these partitions or the drive itself, so I deleted all partitions on the drive leaving only unallocated space. The drive then showed in the MBR format and would let me proceed with the install, but it hung at 0% on expanding files for a long time. When researching why this was happening I found that a common cause for this was that the drive was not formatted correctly. This makes sense because there was previously 100+gb of data on this drive, and it has never been formatted.
This is where I am at now. The Windows 7 installation will not allow me to format the drive (the option is greyed out), so I am trying to do it from the command prompt. I can launch DISKPART, and it is showing only one volume (F
, type: partition, size 698gb, status: healthy, info: pagefile. When I attempt to use the 'clean all' command to wipe all data to 0's I get "clean is not allowed on the disk containing the current boot, system, pagefile, crashdump, or hibernation volume."
When I attempt to use 'Format f:', I get "format cannot run because this volume is in use by another process. Format may run if this volume is dismounted first. ALL OPENED HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID. Would you like to force a dismount on this volume? <Y/N> Y
Cannot lock the drive, the volume is still in use."
I am about ready to pull my hair out, now the machine is completely unusable and I feel completely stuck. I really cannot afford to go and buy a blank SSD or a new SATA drive to install in this POS, so I have to figure something out with this. Thanks.
I soon realized the Win7 would not install on a GPT formatted drive, and running elevated command prompt during install would not let me use diskpart to manually change the drive type to MBR. The drive was broken into a SYSTEM, RECOVERY, OS, and DATA partitions. I was unable to format any of these partitions or the drive itself, so I deleted all partitions on the drive leaving only unallocated space. The drive then showed in the MBR format and would let me proceed with the install, but it hung at 0% on expanding files for a long time. When researching why this was happening I found that a common cause for this was that the drive was not formatted correctly. This makes sense because there was previously 100+gb of data on this drive, and it has never been formatted.
This is where I am at now. The Windows 7 installation will not allow me to format the drive (the option is greyed out), so I am trying to do it from the command prompt. I can launch DISKPART, and it is showing only one volume (F
, type: partition, size 698gb, status: healthy, info: pagefile. When I attempt to use the 'clean all' command to wipe all data to 0's I get "clean is not allowed on the disk containing the current boot, system, pagefile, crashdump, or hibernation volume."When I attempt to use 'Format f:', I get "format cannot run because this volume is in use by another process. Format may run if this volume is dismounted first. ALL OPENED HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID. Would you like to force a dismount on this volume? <Y/N> Y
Cannot lock the drive, the volume is still in use."
I am about ready to pull my hair out, now the machine is completely unusable and I feel completely stuck. I really cannot afford to go and buy a blank SSD or a new SATA drive to install in this POS, so I have to figure something out with this. Thanks.
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