Today a student from the Xinyuan Software Club ran into a problem installing Windows 8 on his own computer. The installation disk was an official original, the image was fine, but it kept saying “Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On an EFI system, Windows can only be installed to a GPT disk,” so he came to me. I’m writing it up today — if you run into the same problem, it’s actually very easy to fix. Let me give you the solution first; if you’re curious, I’ll also explain later why the error occurs and what caused the installation to fail. First, see the screenshot below — the prompt given by the Windows installer: 
Enter the BIOS and see that the UEFI state is Enabled. Try disabling it (change to Disabled) 
Save and restart, and choose to boot from the CD-ROM. Pay attention here. 
Under CD/DVD, choose the Legacy one, save and exit, and the installation below goes smoothly. So why does this error occur? There’s a lot of material about UEFI and Legacy online; I’ll just say what I understand. Legacy — the old, traditional way. The hard disk boots with MBR and supports at most 4 primary partitions. UEFI — supports GPT partitioning of the hard disk, and can support up to 128 primary partitions. Older systems were all BIOS+MBR; now the new standard is UEFI+GPT. MBR and GPT are two partitioning methods; it used to be all MBR, and it seems support for GPT partitions started with Vista. BIOS and UEFI are two boot methods; everyone has generally used BIOS, and UEFI seems to have started being supported from Windows (they say UEFI boot started being supported from Vista), and only then became known to everyone. Because I partitioned with DiskGenius using an MBR partition table, i.e. the so-called master boot record, my hard disk, as the prompt says, has an MBR partition table, and MBR can only boot with the old-style BIOS, while the motherboard firmware defaults to UEFI first, so it couldn’t be installed. So after disabling UEFI, it becomes BIOS+MBR, and the installation goes smoothly.
