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Windows 7 partition analysis bug during setup
Hi,
I've successfully installed several instances of Windows 7 Beta 1 on several virtual machines. However, I am being stymied when attempting to perfrom a "native" install into one of my hard disk partitions in a multiboot configuration. I keep getting the following error message during setup:
"Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition".
I have 2 internal hard disks. The first is a SCSI drive housing an instance of XP. It is the "system disk". The second is an IDE drive housing 4 primary partitions. The first holds NTFS data, the second an instance of XP MCE, the third contains VISTA SP1, the forth is the desired destination partition for Windows 7.
When I boot the Windows 7 setup DVD and get to the point of selecting the target partition I get the above error message.
Things I've tried:
1. Formatted the target partition as a Primary (via XP) - fails with above error msg
2. Formatted the target partition as Logical (via Vista) -- fails with above error msg
3. Left the area unformatted and let setup do the formatting - fails with above error msg
4. Installed a test version of Vista in the target partition first and
then tried to run a Windows 7 "Upgrade" from within that copy
of Vista - fails due to a weird bug requesting install of a disk driver
that device manager shows is already happily working.
I've been all over the web trying to find a solution. Many people have experienced this error message when installing Windows 7 in a multiboot situation with multiple drives but I have not found any viable circumventions. One person claimed that pulling the power cord on all hard disks other than the one containing the destination partition worked but I cannot do that since my SCSI is the "system disk" and houses the BCD and Bootmgr required by the VISTA (and Windows 7) partitions on my IDE drive.
This is probably a bug since Vista installs very nicely into the same partition with no problems. Hopefully it will be fixed by the RTM release. However, I would really like to circumvent the bug so I can use Windows 7 natively in the interim.
Any insights would be appreciated.
Thanks