Alright, so I’ve just replaced my motherboard and CPU and RAM and GPU. I’ve formatted the main drive so I can do a fresh install of Windows 7 (had Vista before). All my other drives are unplugged; research dictates that Win7 doesn’t install if there’s more than one drive plugged in from the start. When I get to the “Where do you want to install windows?” window, the drive does not show up. When I look at it through the driver browser, it shows up as X: Boot. I’m pretty sure the solution is stupidly simple and I’m retarded but any help would be greatly appreciated.
If the only disc you have installed is boot, maybe you need to plug in another one? Wild guess. I’m not really a computer nerd.
It shows up when I do that, but I can’t install the OS into any partition I make in that drive.
Maybe you’re not supposed to be partitioning it?
same results bro
Hm. Like I said, wild guess. I’m assuming you’ve already tried everything I can conjecture past this point, so I just won’t bother.
looks like there are remains of the Vista boot partition, you need to de-partition the drive using ubuntu or another live cd linux distro
when installing windows, you can have more than 1 drive plugged in, just make sure you are installing to the HDD that’s plugged into SATA port 1 (or you need to change the HDD boot order in the BIOS)
oh and X: is just the windows setup DVD, technically it’s a ramdisk that the windows DVD creates in order to launch the installer
Alright. I’ll try that.
So this partition “residue” could still be there even if I did a “clear all” in the command prompt?
update: tried it through the disk and a USB stick and the comp doesn’t seem to recognize it as an OS.
There should be no problem to detect the HDD in windows setup unless your motherboard needs special AHCI drivers or the HDD has a bad MBR in which case you need to repartition it from linux
to put linux on a USB stick you can use unetbootin for windows, it works well with .iso images
it depends on the distribution but you should find a partition manager (gparted or qtparted most likely) to make a new MBR on the HDD
I’m thinking it’s both since I’ve installed the drivers every single time I’ve tried to install the OS. The thing is the main drive doesn’t show up unless the other drives are plugged in. I don’t get that.
There are countless computer issues that nobody has any explanation for. Anyway, you don’t need to remove the other drives just make sure your windows drive is connected to the first sata port on the motherboard and that the BIOS is set to boot from that drive first.
Also maybe it’s a drive letter problem. I once had a problem like that with both XP and Vista being installed on an 80gb drive while the BIOS booted off a 4gb maxtor so when that old thing died my 80gb drive became unbootable.
I’ve heard about that, but how do I change/ add a drive letter if I don’t have an OS?
get access to an OS, the only thing I know that can change a drive letter is diskmgmt.msc
Could this go faster if I just got another drive? I mean this one is over 5 years old anyway.
Having more than one drive plugged in shouldn’t affect anything. You have to choose where to install Windows 7 anyway, so just make sure you choose the right drive. The only time it matters is if you try to install it on one drive while you have another drive plugged in that also has a bootable OS on it. It tries to install in dual-boot mode or something and can easily get messed up.
Also, I don’t know what type of motherboard you have, but I know that some boards (particularly Dell boards) require you to go into the BIOS and manually specify which SATA ports are turned on and which ones are turned off. I’ve been caused grief by that before.
You can get a new drive if you want, but I’d at least try going to into the “Repair your computer” section of the setup (it’s at the bottom when it first asks you what you want to do). From there, choose the command prompt, then try these commands one by one to see if any of them fix it (do them in order from the top):
bootrec.exe /FixMbr
bootrec.exe /FixBoot
bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd
If none of that works, well…let us know what happens.
that won’t fuck up the other drives will it?
–Merge One—[/SIZE]
Holy shit I am a fucking idiot.
They were in the wrong order! To think I was all set to waste about 90 dollars!!!
Fucking hell. Thanks anyway though. From all the threads I’ve found on this subject, they either end with a non-answer or they already had a previous OS installed and they didn’t tell anyone the problem until the last post on the 40th page… So thanks for the help you offered me and gave whoever else comes across this thread.
–Merge Two–[/SIZE]
Edit: New problem. I go in to disk management to import my non-C hard drives (I have two, one 750 gig and the other 1 TB ), and it gives both the same name and only one shows up when I look at them in the file browser. The 1TB has all my important shit on it, so…yeah.
So, only plug in the 1TB drive?
I’m not sure I understand, what do you mean by import your hard drives? Do you mean that you’ve got Windows 7 installed now, but your hard drives aren’t showing up properly? Does disk management show up all three drives (Disk 0, Disk 1, and Disk 2)? Are your partitions all detected as healthy? And what names are you referring to as being the same?
It shows disk 0, 1, and 2. problem is both disks 1 and 2 show as up as drive B.
So, only plug in one at a time, then? If you’ve got all the stuff you want on one drive, you can just use that one.
Maybe use it as an excuse to clean out your files. I probably would.