Absolutely, I hope someone may find this helpful in the future.
I got to say , I kind of expected more details and confirmation from Windows 7 during the format process. Each time I went to delete a partition or format it, I'm more confident seeing a confirmation saying "partition 0 disk 2 has been formatted as GPT" or see that it has been deleted, but it's not there. So that's a little lacking. The last time I formatted the partition, it took like 30 seconds which was longer than any other time, so I was thinking, maybe that worked. And I guess it did. I deleted and formatted several times until it looked right. It will always say at the bottom of that screen,
Windows cannot be installed to this disk... Just ignore that. Right click on the larger partition and install windows there anyway. It will work.
I also expected to see the entire partition as GPT in disk manager. Instead the first 100mb is EFI and always seems to be at 100% free space. While the remainder is formatted as NTFS. Cool
Anyway, here is what I did.
* Go into BIOS . See
ADVANCED BIOS FEATURES then when you enter there you will see
EFI CD/DVD BOOT OPTIONS Choose EFI.
Also make sure your first boot drive is set to CD ROM and have the Win7 DVD in the drive. Exit and save, boot up to Windows and follow the prompts and when you get to the part where it asks "do you want to upgrade Windows, or Custom. Choose Custom and follow the prompts.
* When you are at the screen that says
where do you want to install windows delete one partition at a time. It shouldnt matter which one to do first. You may be left with the unallocated disk space. But that will go away when you reboot.
* Do a reboot back to that same screen. You might find ( if you have 3 drives like I do) Disk 1, Disk 2, Disk 3. I still wasnt sure if this was right, so I deleted whatever I could until I ended up with the 100 mb partiton and the remainder of the drive array size on the other partition. ( i actually did this several times because I was not confident of what I was seeing)
Oh, I almost forgot. I When I ended up with 2 partitons, I made the second ( the drive that windows was installed to) and clicked on "NEW" which allowed me to make that partition size 3815452 MB
* Then click on the larger of the two disk partitions (highlight the drive patition you want to install win7 on) and choose, "next" This will start the Windows 7 install.
You will notice that it might still say that Windows cannot be installed to that partition at the bottom of that screen before you hit NEXT. I dont know why but it always said it. I thought , screw this, were installing windows to something and if it dont work, I'll try it again.
* remember after windows is installed to go back and change the first boot device as hard drive in BIOS.
Thanks AA and DM for your help and patience
