Hi - I am new to this group, so apologies in advance if this has been already asked and answered...
I have a laptop with Win7 on one drive and a Linux system on a second drive installed on it under a UEFI system. I have an empty area on my disk, with Win7, that I want to use for installing Win8 to. When I start the installation process I get to a point where the installer complains that the EFI partition is formatted as an NTFS partition and wants me to reformat it as a FAT32. This is very confusing because both Linux and Windows 7 partitioners are reporting that the EFI partition is already in a FAT32 format! So what gives?
My second concern is that if I reformat the EFI partition, even though it has a protected MBR so I am not worried about losing the partition table, won't I lose the boot manager for Windows 7? That seems rather dangerous and could cause me to lose the ability to boot Windows 7!
How best to proceed?
I have a laptop with Win7 on one drive and a Linux system on a second drive installed on it under a UEFI system. I have an empty area on my disk, with Win7, that I want to use for installing Win8 to. When I start the installation process I get to a point where the installer complains that the EFI partition is formatted as an NTFS partition and wants me to reformat it as a FAT32. This is very confusing because both Linux and Windows 7 partitioners are reporting that the EFI partition is already in a FAT32 format! So what gives?
My second concern is that if I reformat the EFI partition, even though it has a protected MBR so I am not worried about losing the partition table, won't I lose the boot manager for Windows 7? That seems rather dangerous and could cause me to lose the ability to boot Windows 7!
How best to proceed?
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Win7, XP, Linux
- Computer type
- Laptop
- System Manufacturer/Model
- ASUS, Dell
