"Setup was unable to create new system partition" -- I've tried it all

[friolator]

"Setup was unable to create new system partition" -- I've tried it all

I have a machine that has been running Win7 Ultimate for years. lately it's been behaving badly, and it seems the SSD the system was on was starting to fail. So this afternoon I put a new SSD into the machine and went to install Windows on it. I am installing from a DVD, not a USB stick. I have used this installer disc before on other machines, as recently as a few weeks ago. I tried a second disc too, same result.

I keep getting the error in the subject line. I've spent 3 hours trying everything I've found on this forum and others:

1) Using diskpart to manually partition the new drive (found step by step instruction here, didn't work)
2) Turning off all UEFI stuff in the BIOS, and enabling anything labeled "Legacy" (it was all already set that way)
3) Changing the DVD drive and system drive SATA busses from ACPI to IDE
4) moving all the devices from S_SATA to SATA 3 buses, splitting them across the two, and ultimately moving them all back to S_SATA where they originally were.

I've even taken the target SSD out and reformatted it in another machine, then put it back in. no luck.

I'm at my wits end. This machine was running Windows this morning, and has been a solid performer until its system drive started to fail.

What small animal do I need to sacrifice here? I'm willing to try anything at this point, because my whole afternoon is shot!

Thanks

 

[samuria]

Welcome to the forum. The normal way to do it is to delete all partitions and leave the disk blank then just let windows create what it needs

 

[Megahertz07]

Follow this tutorial Clean Install Windows 7 - Windows 7 Help Forums

As you have a UEFI BIOS, Win 7 can be installed as Legacy - MBR or UEFI - GPT. If you boot the installation disk as Legacy, it will install as Legacy - MBR. If you boot the installation disk as UEFI, it will install as UEFI - GPT.
Boot from the Win 7 installation disk, go to install - Advanced - delete all partitions - create new. Install on the big NTFS partition.

 

[friolator]

I have tried all of this, none of it is working.

To be clear - the SSD I'm installing to did at one point have a Linux installation on it, but was put on the shelf after that machine was disassembled. When I put that drive in, I deleted all the partitions in the Win7 installer and reformatted. That didn't work. I switched to command prompt mode and used diskpart to reformat the drive. That didn't work. I took the drive out, put it in a mac, used Disk Utility to change it to one partition, no formatting ("Free Space"). That didn't work.

So a reformat tool in the installer doesn't work. A reformat in diskpart doesn't work. A reformat on a mac doesn't work.

This has been tried with two SSDs, all of which show up to the BIOS, show up in disk formatting tools, and are able to be successfully formatted by those tools. On multiple platforms.

On the installer DVD - in the BIOS I can only set legacy mode for the entire bus (there are two SATA buses on the motherboard), not per-device. At least, I can't find a way to do it per-device. One SATA bus has built-in RAID capability, one doesnt. Both buses are set to "IDE" mode right now (vs ACPI or RAID).

At this point, I'm thinking I might just put in a brand new spinny drive and use that, because I need to get on with my life. But I don't really understand what's happening and would like to. We have three PCs (which I built myself) in the office on this identical motherboard/CPU platform and have never seen this problem - All three have been in daily use for 3-4 years and are reliable machines. All of them have had Windows 7 completely reinstalled at some point or another.

 

[Megahertz07]

Is the computer the one you have on your profile specs (ASRock X99 Extreme4 )?

"Both buses are set to "IDE" mode right now (vs ACPI or RAID)."

IDE mode is an old setting for win 98.
It should be set as ACPI as you're not creating a RAID array.

 

[friolator]

So this morning I went into the BIOS, confirmed that both buses are set to IDE mode. Confirmed that all other settings related to Legacy mode were set on.

I made only one change to the settings: I opted to set up the boot loader display screen and forced it to use the BD/DVD drive as the first boot option, and the SSD as the second. Saved and rebooted, chose the optical drive and booted into the Windows installer. Chose the SSD and it started installing with no errors.

The *ONLY* change I made was to force the Optical disc as the first boot device in the boot loader screen (even though it was already set as the first boot device in the regular boot order, and was previously booting from the disc and running the installer).

So does this boot loader thing somehow change how the optical disc is seen? I can't see why enabling that would suddenly make this work.

Thanks

 

[friolator]

Is the computer the one you have on your profile specs (ASRock X99 Extreme4 )?

"Both buses are set to "IDE" mode right now (vs ACPI or RAID)."

IDE mode is an old setting for win 98.
It should be set as ACPI as you're not creating a RAID array.

Yes, that's the machine in question. It didn't work in ACPI or IDE. IDE is the current state just because it was the last one I tried.

 

[Megahertz07]

Did you detach ALL other HDD from the MB to install win 7 on the SSD?

You should start over with ACPI set. You won't have performance with IDE mode.