I have an old 160GB ATA drive from an old dell and it had XP on. When I tried to boot, it bluescreened immediatley so I decided to put windows 7 ultimate x64. I tried but I got the message about when trying to select the drive in the setup.
I have tried diskpart clean, clean all and assigning, active and creating a partition through that.
Is there anything else anyone can suggest?
What about just making a new partition off of the windows 7 disc; have you tried that already or not?
I have tried doing that:
I fixed the problem. The usb that I was using had two seperate "drives" on it which windows setup didn't like.
There is an issue that happens more commonly with Windows 8 and other UEFI systems where having other USB devices plugged into the machine at the time of installation will cause an error similar to this.
I today tried a reinstall and had the error message as described by the OP.
I ran DISKPART many times but to no avail. In the end I unplugged my wireless mouse and... Hey Presto it worked. I tested again, on the same machine (Sony Vaio VGN-Z31MN) with an external HDD plugged in and it happened again. So what has worked for me may work for you as well :)
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