The case of Windows 7 not wanting to install on your hard drive partition
As an IT Consultant, I often find myself mucking with the latest and greatest things before I would even consider recommending them to clients. The down side to this is the time spent during a Saturday afternoon trying to install Windows 7 Professional 64-bit on my home desktop. I was so impressed with the RC1 version, that I wanted to deploy it to my single desktop (can’t be worse than Vista… heheh)
Apparently, Windows 7 is very picky about the hardware/harddrive/partition/MBR it’s installed on. When I ran the installation, my hard drive and the system partition would be displayed, but I could not get it to actually start the installation..
I tried the following, but to no avail:
- Installed latest drivers
- Deleted partition
- Reformatted newly created partition
- Removed external hard drive and USB key so the only thing left was a single 200GB HD and an IDE cdrom.
- Using diskpart to set the new partition as an ACTIVE partition
Looking at the setup logs (Shift-F10 -> notepad windowspanthersetupact.log), I saw a bunch of “not system disk”, “not primary partition”, “not enough space”, “not good enough” errors…
Finally, I tried to think outside of the box. I decided to repair my MBR and Boot record the old fashion way. I booted off a Windows XP SP2 CD and ran the recovery console. Once in, I ran “fixmbr” and “fixboot”. I then rebooted into Windows 7 setup and was able to click Next to continue with the Windows 7 Professional installation.
Hopefully, this technique would work for most of you. If it still doesn’t work for you, try making sure there’s no USB keys or any other storage device connected when you install.