Asus P8P67 Deluxe – Creating an EFI GPT Boot Disk

I am about to get a 3TB disk But, as you know, for a disk of this size you need to use GPT partitioning. To get ready I thought it would be a good idea to test the procedure by partitioning one of my disk using the EFI GPT scheme. Below you will find the procedure that I have used on a 1TB disk.
But be aware that on a 3TB disk there much more problems to be solved. I have therefore added some references at the bottom.

You need a boot DVD for Windows 7 X64 (X86 version do not allow EFI boot) placed it in your DVD reader (note that I have tried with a bootable Windows 7 X64 on an USB stick but it did not work). You also need an empty drive where you want to install the system.

• Start your system, enter the Asus BIOS and select the “boot” tab.
• In the boot tab go to the “Boot Override section”. You should find an entry for your DVD but you should also find another entry at the bottom of the section for the same DVD but prefixed with UEFI: Click on this entry
• You should see “Press any key to boot from cd…” press space. You now enter the Windows standard setup (select custom install).
• You should eventually be presented a screen with all the disks installed on your system. Locate the disk where you want to install the OS. If you select this disk you may get “Windows cannot be installed to this disk” in that case just ignore the message.
• If the disk you want to use is not empty and unpartitioned go to the “Drive Advance” and click delete.
• Now we want this disk to use GPT scheme. So type Shift-F10. This brings a command window. Type “diskpart”. Under diskpart> prompt type “list disk”. Locate your disk (in my case disk 1) and type “select disk 1”. Now type “convert gpt”. Just to make sure everything went fine type “list disk”. The converted disk should now have a star in the GPT column. Type exit and exit. This should close the command window.
• Select the disk you have just converted and that should display as “Unallocated Space”. Click next (again do not worry if you have the warning message)
• The installation process should start and proceed as usual. After reboot the X64 Windows 7 should be installed on the GPT partitioned disk.

For information I have looked at the content of the drive. For that matter I have restarted the system booting from another disk and looked at the content of the GPT drive. No so many tools are capable to look at or modify GPT partitions. I have used Paragon Hard Disk Manager pro to analyze the disk.

The disk contains 3 partitions:

• First one is called GPT System Partition: Partition Type=EFI System Partition, Type=GPT Volume, File System=FAT32, Size=100 MB
• Second one is called Microsoft Reserved Partition: Partition type=MSR, Type=GPT Volume, File System=Not formatted (OEM service Volume), Size=128MB
• Third one is called Basic data partition: Partition type=Microsoft Basic Data Partition, Type=GPT Volume, File System=NTFS, Size=931 MB

Content of EFI partition:

• [EFI] => bootx64.efi
• [Microsoft] => [Boot] => content is similar to Boot from an MBR system partition

Notes: At the root of the partition the bootmrg is not there. In the [Boot] directory on top of the BCD we can find two files called bootmgr.efi & bootmgfw.efi

Contents of the MSR partition:
Paragon is not able to display the content of this partition using an unknown FS

Content of Data partitions:
It contains the traditional Windows system files. Note the presence of a Recovery directory which is usually located in the hidden System Partition on an MBR volume.
If you use the windows disk management tool you will only see the EFI partition (100 MB) and the data partition but not the MSR partition. You are not able to do anything with the EFI partition in particular you cannot assign a letter to this partition. Therefore this can be a problem for tools that needs to access the BCD (on an MBR disk you can assign a letter to this semi-hidden partition).

References
HOW TO: Use the Diskpart.efi Utility to Create a GUID Partition Table Partition on a Raw Disk in Windows
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297800/en-us

Using GPT Drives
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/gpt-on-x64.mspx

Hitachi Deskstar 3TB Hard Drives - Frequently Asked Questions
http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/869E4925CC72E233862577E100235119/$file/Deskstar_3TB_FAQ_finalwebv2.pdf

WD drives with Advanced Format
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/updates/?family=wdretailkits&wdc_lang=en

How to establish and boot to GPT mirrors on 64-bit Windows
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814070/en-us

DrCoolZic said:

[*]In the boot tab go to the “Boot Override section”. You should find an entry for your DVD but you should also find another entry at the bottom of the section for the same DVD but prefixed with UEFI: Click on this entry

Click to expand...

I do not have this option on my P8P67 Pro

Just burned my windows 8 iso, but there is no DVD UEFI option

Any ideas?

Sexy Red said:

I do not have this option on my P8P67 Pro

Just burned my windows 8 iso, but there is no DVD UEFI option

Any ideas?

Click to expand...

I have the P8P67 Pro and have installed Windows 7 on GPT disk.

The option is under the F8 boot menu (not Windows F8)

Put the Windows 8 DVD in then reboot the system and as soon as the Asus splash screen appears press F8 repeatedly until you see the boot menu. One of the options will be EUFI: DVD-ROM or something.

Also, make sure you are using a clean ISO. There is a lot of misinformation on the net about having to copy and paste files from one folder to another to install GPT, it's all malarkey (whether it works or not is not the concern).

See this for installing Windows 7 with efi from a flash drive: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/15458-uefi-bootable-usb-flash-drive-create-windows.html