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

Thanks limneos,

I think you are on to something.

During a Win7 "Upgrade" install I get an error message indicating that my "Adaptec AIC-7892 Ultra160 PCI SCSI Card" needs updated drivers.

During a Win7 "Clean" install I noticed that my SCSI partitions were not even listed as eligible partition targets.

The driver for the AIC-7892 is old (for NT) but has worked for XP and VISTA. Apparently Win7 is stricter. The driver is Adpu160m.sys (along with Adpu160m.inf) and there is no Win7 version from Adaptec. My PC is a Dell Precision Workstation 530 MP.

I thought I'd try to include Vista driver files for the card as a "additional" driver during a clean install. I was hopeful but when setup displayed the list of partitions the SCSI partitions were again not included. I get a message indicating that "windows is unable to install to the selected location - error 0X80300001.

I haven't yet found what 0x80300001 signifies but I presume it has something to do with not having I/O access to the disk.

I am not installing to the SCSI drive but it is still required by setup because it contains the BCD and Bootmgr.

Any ideas on how to bypass this driver issue? I'm sure the driver would work since Vista and Win7 driver architecture is supposed to be nearly identical. I just need to have Win7 accept it.

Thanks again

Everything is now hunky dory! It turns out that I had made a wrong assumption. When I inserted the driver disk during setup I assumed that I would be prompted to eject it and reinsert the setup disk once the driver information was processed. I got no such prompt so I proceeded by hitting NEXT thinking that at the right moment setup would ask again for the setup disk. Instead I got the 0x80300001 error. Live and learn.

Anyway, setup completed and everything is working now. I was a little worried about the fact that I was installing into a forth primary partition on the target IDE drive and that perhaps this would interfere with Windows 7's purported attempts at generating an additional special 200MB primary partition that I had read about. That, of course would have been a 5th primary which is not allowed. Instead, apparently as an alternative, setup built a new directory named RECOVERY within the file structure of the main target partition. For a while I had suspected that my setup problems might be related to the processing associated with this extra partition but that was not the case.
The only remaining oddity is that the SCSI drive can be accessed but is not assigned a drive letter by Windows 7. That will be the next project.

Thanks again limneos for your help.

Yey. So glad that i have found this thread. I had the exact same problem with my marvell scsi controller and paniced a little since vista worked with no problems. So basecly its all about puting the os dvd back into the drive after you install the aditional drivers for scsi. Cheers to everyone and bring on the end user lucky 7 ( not that i dont like my msdn version n_n )

lordmethos said:

Yey. So glad that i have found this thread. I had the exact same problem with my marvel scsi controler and paniced a little since vista worked with no problems. So basicly its all about puting bag the os cd back into the drive after you install the aditional drivers for scsi. Cheers to everyone and bring on the end user lucky 7 ( not that i dont like my msdn version n_n )

LM

If that doesn't fix it you should start a new thread. Most ppl will not look at old, old thread.

BTW welcome to seven forums

Ken