Originally Posted by
BigLar
There's an even better explanation/procedure
here.
I'm sure it works, and I think I had run across this first. However, both procedures involve a lot more work than boot-select-delete-create. More than one way to skin a cat.
the other one mentioned using diskpart also.
Was the disk not even visible in diskmgmt?
GPT is the GUID based partition table, used by UEFI and other firmware. New computers all come with UEFI these days, a replacement for the old BIOS. Modern versions of Windows, including 7, understand and can create GPT labels. (not sure if it was there from the beginning of 7 or not.)
People (including me) mistakenly call it the EFI label, because EFI uses it and may have had a part in defining it, but the correct term is the GPT label.
The old MBR label used by BIOS had size and other limitations that required a replacement as disks grew over the last decade. BIOS wasn't the only firmware with those limitations, the industry had to adapt and the GUID based partition table was adopted by most of the industry. It puts a fake MBR in block 0 that makes it look like the entire disk is allocated so if you plug the disk into an old computer that doesn't understand GPT, the disk will appear to be full with a single type EE partition, IIRC. You can, of course re-label it with a new MBR at that point, wiping out the rest of the disk.
-David