Vista Will Not Install

Rezident · 18 Oct 2007 at 21:46

Finally decide to give Vista a chance and it refuses to install on any of my hard drives. It's a new-build and I haven't done this in years so presumably I've missed something, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Vista prepares to install, I enter the product key, asks me which drive to install it on (there's 3: a 150Gb raptor and two 500Gb Spinpoints) so I select the Raptor and it says:

Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation.

Says the same for the two other drives when I tried them.

Also, in Vista install it identifies the drives as Drive 0, 1 and 2 "unallocated space" for all of them. Also before I try to install Vista says:

This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disc, ensure disk controller is enabled in the BIOS.

for all three drives.

All drives show up in the BIOS, I changed boot order to CD, then hard drives still won't work. Also tried changing order of drives in BIOS to make Raptor first but still no joy.

Tute · 18 Oct 2007 at 22:02

There's a bug with the Vista install and non-partitioned drives when you have more than one SATA hard drive.

I ran into it myself when I installed Vista, ended up having to use my Windows XP CD to format the drive, then running the Vista install.

Gimme a sec, i'll try to find a link to it.

[Edit] Ta da! http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933925

Seems there's a console on the Vista DVD that allows you to partition from there, wish i'd have known that at the time. :rolleyes:

swinnie · 18 Oct 2007 at 22:02

Are the drives formatted to FAT32 or NTFS?

Tute · 18 Oct 2007 at 22:06

swinnie said:
Are the drives formatted to FAT32 or NTFS?

It's a new-build

I'm assuming they're totally unpartitioned, especially as the Support Article lists the exact symptoms he's having.

Rezident · 18 Oct 2007 at 22:18

Tute said:
I'm assuming they're totally unpartitioned, especially as the Support Article lists the exact symptoms he's having.

Yeah they're brand new, haven't done anything to them yet. Thanks a million for the link, I'll try that. Cheers.

Rezident · 18 Oct 2007 at 22:21

Tute said:
There's a bug with the Vista install and non-partitioned drives when you have more than one SATA hard drive.

I ran into it myself when I installed Vista, ended up having to use my Windows XP CD to format the drive, then running the Vista install.

Gimme a sec, i'll try to find a link to it.

[Edit] Ta da! http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933925

Seems there's a console on the Vista DVD that allows you to partition from there, wish i'd have known that at the time.

That's exactly it! Thanks a million.

longshanks · 18 Oct 2007 at 22:23

I just installed Vista in a mates new pc and he has 2 sata HD's. All i did was leave the 2nd one unplugged. Installed Vista on the one plugged in and then re-connected the 2nd one and entered Disk Management and then installed the 2nd hard drive (Formatted etc).

Rezident · 19 Oct 2007 at 09:31

Yep, that's the other workaround, I used the first workaround and it worked perfectly. Cheers.