Installing Vista or 7 using UEFI+GPT

[hydro2duo]

MAKE SURE SECURE BOOT IS OFF WHICH IT PROBABLY IS IF YOU ARE READING THIS, ALSO MOST VISTA COMPATIBLE MACHINES LIKELY DONT SUPPORT UEFI  

This took a while to do here properly but I figured it out in the end. This works on an OptiPlex 390 using Vista SP2 x64 and a HDD in UEFI mode, booted from a UEFI+GPT USB (made from the original MSDN SP2 ISO and Rufus 3.5).

For some reason it seems to bug out when trying to install even to a clean HDD. It’ll complain about being unable to boot from the device on your machine and then fail to create the partitions correctly with an error.

There is a way around this and it’s fairly strange to me... which likely pinpoints it to being a problem with diskpart’s conversion system to GPT and the Vista SP2 installation environment: on the disk/partition selection, open a command prompt window (Shift+F10) and type the following:

diskpart

list disk

select disk ü

clean

exit

exit

DON’T TYPE CONVERT GPT! IT SEEMS TO JUST COME UP THE ERRORS AGAIN, ALSO REPLACE ü WITH WHATEVER YOUR DISK IS OF COURSE

Now exit the installation process and reboot the machine (don’t force it off, just let it reboot and then open the computer’s boot manager to boot into the Vista USB.

When you get to the disk select screen just press next and it works fine from there. Wait a while and it should eventually get you to the OOBE.

Once you’re booted into the desktop tap Windows+R and open diskmgmt.msc, confirm the UAC prompt and right click your C drive’s properties to confirm it is using a GUID partition table

If everything worked, enjoy! Some older boards supporting UEFI if they exist may want you to specify an EFI boot file, or if for some reason the entry isn’t made during the installation.

Remember this is an EOL OS. Take obvious caution and read up on the subject as necessary, and don’t refrain from asking around/searching the community for help if you’re not entirely versed 

 

Note: While I wrote this for Vista it will work on W7 too the same way  

Edited July 11, 2019 by hydro2duo

[burd]

is this native uefi or uefi with csm?

[hereinthebubble]

On 7/17/2019 at 6:22 PM, burd said:

is this native uefi or uefi with csm?

Native UEFI.