Windows 8.1 installation failure

Question

I have an issue with installing Windows 8.1 on my laptop.

The files for windows are on a bootable usb stick and when I try to install Windows from there, it seems to work fine at first in that I can put in my product key and then I am prompted to select a drive.

Now, when I've selected a drive to install Windows on, the setup goes to the installation screen, but then I get an error that I do not understand.

The error I get is saying that the .efi files are formatted as NTFS and that I need to convert them to Fat32. How can I accomplish this?

Edit

To explain a little better:

• The harddrive is completly empty.

• The error message is in dutch and this is how i think its correctly translated:

  The EFI files are formatted in NTFS, Format them as FAT32 and try the installation again.

The error could not be excecly correct because my english is not really good to translate that sentence.

I hope you can point me to the right direction to solve my problem.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool will not create an UEFI-bootable thumb drive. This is because the stick is formatted with NTFS, whereas UEFI requires FAT32. This probably what the message is referring to, also it’s not exactly clear why it would refuse to install in BIOS mode.

To create an UEFI-bootable Windows Setup drive, simply format it with FAT32 and copy the entire DVD contents over. And that is all.

For good measure, you could also clear the disk (again). Simply press ShiftF10 after selecting your regional settings, but before starting Setup. From the command prompt, execute the following commands:

diskpart
list disk
select disk X
clean
exit
exit

...where X is the correct disk as listed by the previous command.

Answer 2

I guess there's some problem with your EFI partition. You have either formatted it to NTFS by accident or Windows installer doesn't detect it correctly.

First you should have some notion of what partitions are. My answer to another question contains some explaination of that concept. I recommend you to read through it (you can skip "The Reserved Partition" and "The Big Question").

I'm assuming your laptop is relatively new (4 years or newer), so it probably has UEFI support and it has legacy boot disabled by default. Thus, it must also have EFI partition (see my link), but something bad happened to it and it's now NTFS-formatted, while it should be FAT32 or Windows installer doesn't detect it correctly.

In this case I'd set up a new partition table, thus removing all partitions. Windows installer should be able to recreate required partitions. This operation will delete all your data. This can be done with GParted which is part of many LiveCD Linux distros (ones that run off a CD/DVD, no need to install them), there's also dedicated GParted LiveCD which can be booted from USB. When you have GParted up and running, choose your disk from the top right combo box and click Device → New Partition Table. A new window will appear:

Choose gpt partition table type and click Apply. At this point your HDD will be wiped completely. Creating new partition table is effective immediately. Then you'll want to reboot into Windows installer and this time everything should go smoothly.

If you don't want to have your disk wiped then you can try booting GParted and deleting all partitions except for ones that contain files you want to preserve, especially small partition at the beginning of your drive which probably is the EFI partition. I think Windows installer will recreate it, but I haven't tried myself - if it won't work out of the box, you'll have to recreate EFI partition manually in GParted, including setting appropriate flags. I'm lazy, so I'd probably just backup my files to external drive, disconnect it and wipe internal HDD.

There's also a small chance your Windows 8 flash drive is malfunctioning. You can try to install from another flash drive. You have probably put Windows on that drive using Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool or Rufus, trying the other one won't hurt too.

Answer 3

BEFORE ANYBODY WIPES THEIR ENTIRE HDD/SSD, PLEASE CALM YOURSELF AND READ THE FOLLOWING:

I had the same problem. I'd already formatted the partition I wanted to install Windows to. So what I ended up doing was deleting (not format) all partitions on my computer's drive that were system created. You know, the ones that are like 100mb and 500mb and Reserved and such. I did not touch the partition which had all my personal files, that I had created the last time I'd installed Windows. Once the System partitions were all deleted, I created a new partition from the unallocated space, and Windows Setup automatically re-created all the system partitions it needed, and the process went smoothly from there. I want to thank gronostaj for maybe giving me the idea to do this (I can't remember if I thought of it before or after reading the last part of his/her answer).

This happened to me with Windows 10, by the way.