Question about reinstalling windows 7/fresh install/factory settings.

I think the included drivers for setup only allow for installation on HDD up to XXXGBs. I think Windows does not natively support 1TB or above HDD for installation.

If I remember correctly you can load additional drivers from a USB.

I don't think it matters if you have a partition. I think windows just doesn't have the drivers on the installation disk to support writing data to a 1TB drive.

Mabe this is relavent

I had a long post typed, then refreshed the page... I'll try this again, since I've more or less resolved the problem.

Using Parted Magic, I deleted the two EFI partitions that I spoke of before. This allowed the Windows 7 Installer to detect the drive. I recreated the EFI partitions as well as the 80GB partition for Windows. Once this stage of installation completed, I went to Audit Mode. Diskmgmt now reported the formerly Dynamic Disk as a Basic Disk**, and showed the space where my shared 150GB NTFS Data partition resides as Free Space. Figuring that the Installer had not formatted the partition, but merely omitted it from the partition table, I booted Parted Magic again. With FDISK I reinstated the partition in the table, which resolved the problem under linux. I was again able to access the data, none of which was lost, and GPARTED showed the partition properly (with correct type, label, etc).

fdisk /dev/sda
> p (print partition table)
> n (new partition)
> Start of partition? [press enter if the default is correct]
> Size of partition? [press enter if the default is correct]
> w (write to disk)

All was fine under linux, but Windows (in Audit Mode) still failed to access the partition. I resolved this by setting the partition type to NTFS (0x07) with DISKPART.

diskpart
> list disk
> ...
> list volume
> ...
> list partition
> ...
> select partition 6
> set id=07

I'm now able to access the Data, and am almost ready to complete the installation. All that remains is to set the user folders location to the Data drive, complete installation, and reinstate GRUB as my bootloader.

** To the best of my knowledge, it is imposible to convert from Dynamic to Basic without data loss, yet it seems that is what has happened. Other than having to correct the partition table, there was no data loss, does anybody have any insight on how this may have happened? Another odd thing worth noting is that Diskmgmt shows an extended partition on the drive, as it should, but it only wraps one partition (Data), rather than all 5 partitions that should be included. The way it appears however, there are six primary partitions, which is too many for a Basic Drive. Also, GPARTED reports the correct structure.