Hijacking this thread for a good cause: I've also had this problem, and I've managed to identify yet another cause and a solution. I was trying to install a clean windows to a clean sata drive from a usb stick. None of the suggestions worked, however I was lucky enough to have a DVD drive in my freshly bought Lenovo B590, and with a DVD, the installation went past the point of partitioning and finished as it was supposed.
But this was not an acceptable solution, so I went back to make it work with the USB. In my case, the problem seemed to arise from the fact that I was trying to use a usb 3.0 stick. However, as we all know, the installation process doesn't natively support usb 3.0 yet. But one would think it's not an issue, both the system and the os should fall back to 2.0, and this shouldn't cause any issues. WRONG!
I couldn't test it yet, but I guess it that for some strange reason, the 2.0 mode doesn't work properly if your stick is already 3.0 capable. When trying to use the 3.0 slot, i came to the point where it asked me for a driver, so then I assumed it's easier to use the 2.0 slot on the other side of the machine. Wrong path, as it turned out, as I then got to the infamous "'
windows 7 setup was unable to create a new partition bla bla bla" error. Anyway, this is what I had to do.
- Grab enough beer
- Look for the usb 3.0 drivers, extract the inf files from the setup, copy them to some media (I preformatted my hard drive with gparted and copied the files onto a logical partition, so that I don't bring more unknown factors into the equation by using a second usb drive)
- put the usb drive into a slot which is 3.0 compatible
- try to boot from the usb (for some reason, I couldn't bring it to work in uefi mode, not with rufus, nor with anything else, it just refused to boot, but i don't care)
- once the BIOS hands over the controls to the windows installer (after language selection), the usb3 drive ceases to work. Then windows asks for the driver.
- browse to the previously copied inf file, and try to install it. It detects the intel host controller in my case, tries to install it, then reports back that there is no such device connected. Well, f*ck you, you are wrong. Instead of quitting, hit refresh at this point. Now suddenly, besides the host controller, the usb root hub shows up as an option. That's what we want
- once the hub is installed, it proceeds to the partition selection. I've had everything already preformatted, and one working copy of windows already installed from the dvd. But the latter doesn't make a difference, when i followed the regular installation steps without installing usb 3.0 and using a 2.0 port, i got the same error, so the existing installation didn't help.
- at this point, first, I got the usual error. But then I started to play around with the usb 3.0 compatibility setting in the bios, and finally, usb 3.0 "enabled" hit the jackpot. "disabled", "smart auto", nor "auto" seemed to work.
- Once I put it to "enabled", and then went on through the previous steps, the magic happened: windows started to copy files. I waited until 95% completion, but I didn't want another copy of the os on a second partition, so I abandoned setup at this point. I assume it would have finished from here on.
Anyway, I hope I could help, it really was an awkward but memorable experience!
