Windows 7: Windows 7 can't find my hard drive.

I'm doing a complete install from Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional (apparently a simple upgrade isn't possible). But the installation never gets started, because when it asks me to select a drive to install to, the list is blank. It can't find my hard drive, and there's no way to direct it to do so.

This is odd, because Vista has always run perfectly for me, and I've never experienced any issues. All of my Windows updates and drivers are current, Microsoft Security Essentials is disabled, and still Windows 7 can't seem to find my C drive. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Upgrade is possible. Run setup.exe when Vista is up and running. Close all apps including 3rd party firewalls and antivirus before doing so.

Is it? During install, I clicked "upgrade" but received a message saying that an upgrade wasn't possible from Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional, and that only a clean install would work.

Seems you could with the beta but now you can not, as I found during my very brief research for you. You are correct on that it would appear.

Don't really know why the installer can not find your HDD. I'll keep it on my mind and if I think of a good reason, I'll be sure to post again.

It would be very helpful to me and everyone else that may help, for you to fill in what you can in your system specs. Perhaps a reason will become apparent to us.

My guess at this point is that you are running a SATA hard drive and the Windows install DVD does not contain a driver for your SATA controller. In this case, have the driver ready on a cd, a usb stick or floppy. (USB or floppy is best choice, in case DVD drive is on SATA too.) You can tell it to use the driver when you go to install again.

The driver is typically found on the cd for your motherboard.

Thanks for your insight. How do I determine which SATA driver I need? (I have no CD for the motherboard).

Thanks again,

JP

Can you boot into Vista right now? Open device manager, double click IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, double click what you see with "Serial ATA controller" or similar.

Go to details tab, change the dropdown to hardware ids. Copy and paste the results. I'll see what I can come up with.

Alas, my Vista machine is at home, while I languish here at work. I'll check on your suggestions ASAP this evening and post my findings.

Thanks.