cannot install windows 7

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1dog

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Apr 11, 2010
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Hi guys,

What I'm trying to do: Set up Windows 7 on my 5TB drive.

Background:
I am trying to install Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate on a 5TB disk. My BIOS setup does not have a UEFI option, that seems to be needed for Win 7 setup to recognize GPT format drives on installation.
I had installed 7 on it but realized it only recognized 2TB of my 5TB so I reinstalled. After some browsing, I figured out how to use the DiskPart (Shift+F10) option in setup and tried "clean all". It was taking a while and on reading that people have stopped it using Ctrl+C or simply closing the cmd window, I used Ctrl+C. Then I used "clean" and got a success message.

My problem: I managed to delete all partitions but I get the message "Windows is unable to install to the selected location. Error: 0x80300024"
Then I tried using format in Diskpart and got "Virtual Disk Service error: The media is write protected."
I have tried using DiskPart to clear the Read Only attribute on the disk ("Attributes Disk Clear Readonly") but I get the message "DiskPart failed to clear disk attributes".

Any help appreciated. Thanks.
 
Solution
electro_neanderthal
If you can, reformat the drive using a Linux distro - Ubuntu is the easiest to use - (use a FAT32 format). That should make the drive usable again.

As for the 2TB limit you seem to have, that's the limit of not having UEFI ( according to Microsoft: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2581408/windows-support-for-hard-disks-that-are-larger-than-2-tb ). Splitting the 5TB into several partitions of 2TB or less should let you use the entire HDD, but with different drive names for each partition.
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electro_neanderthal

electro_neanderthal

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Jan 22, 2018
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If you can, reformat the drive using a Linux distro - Ubuntu is the easiest to use - (use a FAT32 format). That should make the drive usable again.

As for the 2TB limit you seem to have, that's the limit of not having UEFI ( according to Microsoft: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2581408/windows-support-for-hard-disks-that-are-larger-than-2-tb ). Splitting the 5TB into several partitions of 2TB or less should let you use the entire HDD, but with different drive names for each partition.
 
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Solution
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1dog

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Apr 11, 2010
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Thanks. I went an easier route. Sacrificed XP on a 120GB drive by installing 7 on that one - barely ever booted in XP, so no big loss. 5TB was then released under Disk Manager. Will buy 2TB drives from now on when for OS and leave the larger ones for storage (as the 5TB originally was for).
 
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