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I've got quite an interesting system configuration here, and I would like to install Windows 10 preview on it. I have 3 drives, out of which one is a SSD. They all have a GPT table.
- Drive 0 (the ssd) has the following partitions on it:
- EFI SYSTEM PARTITION (fat32)
- Linux '/' (ext4)
- Linux '/home' (ext4)
- Drive 1 is fully dedicated to data.
- LVM2 Physical Volume
- Drive 2 is the drive I want to install windows to.
- LVM2 Physical Volume
- Empty space (for windows)
After I boot the installer in UEFI mode, I select the 'Drive 2 Unallocated space' entry. It returns an error message:
Your EFI system partition is formatted as NTFS. It needs to be formatted as FAT32. Please reformat your EFI partition and then try again. No changes to your computer will be saved.
There are 2 interesting things about that message, the first one is that after I rebooted to Linux, the partitions Windows has created were still there, therefore changes to my computer apparently were saved. Here is a screenshot of GParted showing the resulting configuration.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5011799/-dev-sdc%20-%20GParted_010.png
The other thing is, that one of the partitions Windows created was an EFI FAT32. My suspicion is that the installer did not see - from whatever reason - my already existing partition on Drive 0 and attempted to create a new one. However, since a partition already existed on Drive 2 and I think the installer later looks for the EFI partition using just the index number on the drive, it found a different partition which was - in this case - formatted as NTFS, hence giving me the error message.
I tried one other things, and that was installing on a GPT drive with no partitions at all. What surprised me is that the installation failed too, with the following message:
Windows could not prepare your computer to boot into the next stage of the installation. To install Windows, please restart the installation. No changes to your computer will be saved.
As the error suggests, I restarted the installation (again finding the four partitions the installer has created regardless of the message) and it failed in the exact same way again. My only idea was that it had something to do with my other drives, so I pulled all of them out but it failed yet again. (Same error message as last time). I have no clue what is going on here.
I am now going to try installing Windows 8.1 and will report back shortly.
Any help or ideas are appreciated.
EDIT: Windows 8.1 also gave me the 'formatted as ntfs' error when installing to the drive with an existing partition, and I currently don't have access to an empty hard drive.
Huh. I'm having the exact same issue... googling now but so far you're the only person I've found with the issue. Any idea what it was? Corrupt installation medium? – Zeroedout – 2015-07-30T10:21:01.553