Question: I bought a new laptop without windows. Now i want to install windows 8. I formated entire harddisk(file format = NTFS) and then tried to install windows 8. When selecting the disk to install, it gets a error saying, “windows cannot be installed to this disk. the selected disk has an MBR partition table. on Efi system, windows can only be installed to gpt disks”. Please tell me, what i can do?
Answer: Inside windows installer, hit Shift+F10 to get a command prompt, then run diskpart and select the target disk. ?Zap the drive (with the clean command), create GPT table (new gpt), create the GPT-EFI special partitions.
Step-by-step instructions provided by Microsoft here (For Windows XP x64, newer versions of diskpart such as included in your Windows 8 support all these commands and more)
Then reboot so the firmware finds those partitions and adds the disk to the EFI-native boot order (Windows installer checks this).