Windows 7: Error code 0x8000ffff when Windows 7 Update restarts

Taking your questions in order
1) The 'Get new featues....' offer is a lead-in to offering an Anytime Upgrade to a higher edition - not a service pack.

2)I dislike FireFox - it requires way too many add-ins to be a useful browser, and they all have their foibles. I usually use IE or Chrome. As far as I know it doesn't use .NET at all.

3) New HD - open Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) and find the disk there - right-click on it and select Initialize, then partition and format it, and assign a drive letter.

Each to their own. I like FireFox and run it on all my PCs. I found IE more flaky and gave it up some time ago - maybe it has improved.

Hi again, Noel:

I don't mean to whine, but right-clicking in my version of "diskmgmt.msc" doesn't bring up any option I recognize as Initialize, and no options I recognize as "partition" or "format". I would like to use the disk in a single partition, and formatted as an NTFS disk, which is what I see disk 0 as [in this view]:



To get this view, I first right-click on disk 0, then right-click on properties, then, on the volume tab, select disk 0 and click on the properties "properties" button again, where I should be able to name the disk. But when I try that path for disk 1, I get the view in the following screen:



I get the same result on D:, which is CD-ROM 0. When I look at the driver tab on disk 1, I see this:




Perhaps I should re-start the last few postings as a separate thread, but I don't know how to do that. Why don't I get an "initialize" option when I use Disk Management? I have been trying to read through the help screens for Adding Hard Disk Drives [which I printed off at 22 pages], but most of those seem to refer to the topic under Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista. What am I doing wrong that I can't find an "Initialize" option so that I can partition and format the drive, and assign it a drive letter? And is there any way to assign it drive letter D:, and re-assign the DVD-ROM as E:?

It looks as if the disk has already been initialized - but not partitioned or formatted.

You have to partition it before you can format it -

1. In Disk Management, right-click the unallocated space on the dynamic disk on which you want to create the simple volume, and then click New Simple Volume.
2. In the New Volume Wizard, click Next, click Simple, and then follow the instructions on your screen.

Okay, Noel, I think I may have found it. Whilst looking at Disk Manager and showing my younger brother how I couldn't get an initialize screen, I noticed the legend at the bottom that says "Unallocated" is in black and "Primary partition" is in blue, as in this screen shot:



When I right-clicked on the black bar on drive 1, the bar indicating that the entire disk was unallocated, the system responded with a "New Simple Volume Wizard" that looks like this:



Since what I wanted was a volume on a single disk, I clicked "Next", and saw this:



So I opted for the maximum disk space and clicked "Next", and saw this next screen:



After assigning the disk letter "E" (I would have preferred it be D, but the system assigned that letter to the DVD-ROM drive), I clicked "Next", and saw this:



After which, when I clicked Finish, the Wizard finished and activated the disk. It looks like you were right, Noel, that the disk was already initialized, and only needed to be formatted -- I did exactly what you were probably at the time writing that I should do. Thanks for your help.

You're welcome - good luck with it!