I normally consider myself pretty tech savvy, but over the last couple of weeks my laptop has been seriously acting up and I'm at the absolute end of my technical knowledge. I have decided that with the number and variety of my problems I want to perform a clean reinstall but have now gotten stuck on that too. I would be very grateful if someone could bail me out on this one.
First, specs and background, I don't think any of this is necessary to answer my main question and you can probably skip it, but I'll put it all out anyway. Problems are with a Toshiba satellite laptop, intel i3 processor, 4 gigs ram, 500 gb hard drive. Not a high end computer but I'm not a heavy user and it's only a year or two old. About 2 weeks ago it started acting up, blue screens mostly, with several different error messages. I did a lot of trouble shooting on my own including running checks on my hard drive and ram, both of which came up clean, I ended up doing a refresh on the laptop, that worked for a while before I started experiencing all the same problems. I escalated through a couple of other restore options all of which were cut short be error messages saying they couldn't complete. At this point, I want to try a completely clean installation of windows 8.1
Now on to the question. I didn't have an 8 or 8.1 cd available, but I made one with the tool microsoft provides for that purpose and it seems to work fine. I have booted to the cd and started the installation but I'm stuck on the "where do you want to install windows" screen. I see 6 partitions listed as follows
459 mb "recovery"
260 mb "system" (now formatted and listed as "primary", hope I didn't screw anything up too bad by doing that)
128 mb "MSR (reserved)"
454 gb "primary" (there's a string of letters and numbers associated with this one that I can copy if needed)
450 mb "recovery"
10.5 gb "recovery"
In addition, all of these partitions have an alert "Windows can't be installed to this disk, the selected disk is of the GPT partition style"
I have never partitioned a drive before and always bought computers with windows already installed. I really have no idea what to do here. All my data and drivers are backed up and I have the product key from the current installation. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
First, specs and background, I don't think any of this is necessary to answer my main question and you can probably skip it, but I'll put it all out anyway. Problems are with a Toshiba satellite laptop, intel i3 processor, 4 gigs ram, 500 gb hard drive. Not a high end computer but I'm not a heavy user and it's only a year or two old. About 2 weeks ago it started acting up, blue screens mostly, with several different error messages. I did a lot of trouble shooting on my own including running checks on my hard drive and ram, both of which came up clean, I ended up doing a refresh on the laptop, that worked for a while before I started experiencing all the same problems. I escalated through a couple of other restore options all of which were cut short be error messages saying they couldn't complete. At this point, I want to try a completely clean installation of windows 8.1
Now on to the question. I didn't have an 8 or 8.1 cd available, but I made one with the tool microsoft provides for that purpose and it seems to work fine. I have booted to the cd and started the installation but I'm stuck on the "where do you want to install windows" screen. I see 6 partitions listed as follows
459 mb "recovery"
260 mb "system" (now formatted and listed as "primary", hope I didn't screw anything up too bad by doing that)
128 mb "MSR (reserved)"
454 gb "primary" (there's a string of letters and numbers associated with this one that I can copy if needed)
450 mb "recovery"
10.5 gb "recovery"
In addition, all of these partitions have an alert "Windows can't be installed to this disk, the selected disk is of the GPT partition style"
I have never partitioned a drive before and always bought computers with windows already installed. I really have no idea what to do here. All my data and drivers are backed up and I have the product key from the current installation. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- windows 8