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I receive this message when I try to install Windows 7 on a GPT Disk

The partitions on the disk selected for installation are not in the recommended order. For additional information about installing to GPT disks go to the Microsoft website (www.microsoft.com) and search for GPT. Do you want to proceed with installation?

Is it safe to click on Yes and proceed with the installation? I have UEFI on my laptop, it is SAMSUNG 300E4C/300E5C/300E7C.

user197441
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3 Answers3

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  1. I also got the same alert/prompt while installing Windows 7 on a GPT disk, to make it a dual boot with pre-installed Windows 8 (on a laptop with single internal disk), but I went ahead because all the things were in right order and I realized the equation can never be satisfied while making a dual boot on a single GPT disk with no problems ever.

  2. The ideal/recommended order is mentioned here - let's see what it says:
    • If you make the GPT disk unallocated & then proceed with the installation, you will end with this structure: Default Configuration
    • But preferably, you should plan this structure to make the Recovery easier: Recommended Configuration
      • The Recommended structure requires some extra steps and is followed in OEM Laptops

  3. One will not be able to satisfy the equation for a dual boot ever on the same internal disk (see above) because a data partition should come in between the main Windows partition & Recovery Image partition. When you attempt to make a dual boot, you are planning two adjacent windows partitions, which will each look to the other as data partitions. The previously installed OS satisfies the equation, but the latter installed OS has a data partition placed before it, and I think that's the problem.

  4. There's a separate link for Win 10, but I think there is a mistake within the link and image: Win 10 GPT Config
    • It seems wrong because it puts Recovery partition (WinRE) after Windows partition & doesn't mention Recovery Image partition at all!
      • The WinRE tools partition which comes at the first place in Win 7/8 GPT config share same Type ID: de94bba4-06d1-4d40-a16a-bfd50179d6ac with the Recovery partition that comes after Windows in the Win 10 GPT config as per the text of the links.
      • How we can we confirm the mistake? I have OEM laptops shipped with win 7/8 with GPT. They came originally configured as per the link for Win7 /8.
        But... I have never come across an OEM laptop shipped with win 10 with GPT with original OEM config. Do you have one?

  5. The Win 10 GPT config link also says about the partition order (leaving Recovery & Recovery Image Partition) that the non-Windows managed utility partition(s) should follow EFI & MSR partitions & Windows, with Data partition(s) following thereafter.
    • Partition Order: EFI, MSR, Non-Windows managed utility, Windows, Data
      • I think it should be exactly followed in the Win 7/8 GPT config as well.
      • It also seems obvious that Recovery Image Partition, if any, should serve as the last Partition on the disk, after Data Partition(s). So, where the Recovery (WinRE Tools) Partition in Win 10 GPT Config?
Ramhound
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Vineet Garg
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This is mostly likely going to be fine. As stated by some other answers, this can be rather easy to handle so that more people can satisfy Microsoft Windows and not have the warning pop up.

However, having the partitions in the wrong order is not typically going to be a critical issue. The reason why it can be desirable to have partitions in a certain order is so that some partitions may be able to be resized more easily, by cannibalizing space in other partitions. In particular, the partitions for special purposes (System partition, Recovery partition, and MSR partition) may often have quite a bit of free space. It seems like Microsoft was initially unsure about how much data they would like to store in such partitions over time. As it turns out, the answer ended up being: not much.

None of which will matter if you don't end up resizing partitions. (And even if you do find a need to re-size partitions and it can't be done easily, you're still looking at a task that can be done reasonably easily through backup, re-partitioning, and restoring.) So for typical day-to-day usage, this doesn't pose a particularly worrying significant threat to data, or other such catastrophic concerns.

TOOGAM
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First of all, if you are installing onto a "clean" disk with no valuable data, the worst that it can do is fail to install. If it installs and works, cool, you're good to go. If not, you can try to fix it.

Now, I've found some other people on a mailing list who are apparently puzzled by this same problem. Their solution was, in order to play it safe, they wiped the entire hard disk (using a partition utility) and let the Windows Installer create the partitions in the order it wanted them in. This made the error message go away.

So you have two options:

  1. Try it. If it works, you can forget about the problem. If it breaks, you'll end up doing the next step anyway:

  2. Just wipe the entire disk clean (delete all partitions and/or re-initialize the partition table) using a tool such as Gparted, sysresccd, or a Linux live CD. You might even be able to use a Windows PE environment if you insist on not using non-Microsoft tools.

allquixotic
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