Some little help with trying to reinstall Windows 7...

[MrRalphMan]

Ok, I'm tearing what little hair I have left out trying to reinstall windows 7.

 

I have a little AMD powered PC with a FoxConn motherboard, 2GB of memory and a GT6600 graphics card.

 

I've been running windows 7 on it without a hitch for months now, well there is one little hitch, my USB Adaptor that allows me to use PlayStation 2 controllers doesn't work.

 

The machine sees the USB adaptor, but it doesn't see the connected controller(s). This seems to be a common issue with this controller and 64bit Windows 7.

 

All was fine until I decided to try to dual boot with XP, to get the gaming back online for the kids.

 

I had a few issues and managed to resolve them all with /fixmbr, fixboot etc.

 

I then was told that EasyBCD would be able to help, so I used that and that's where it all fell apart.

 

After using it, I got /boot/bcd missing errors. Nothing would fix this.

 

I saw a fix using diskpart and then bootrec. So I fired up diskpart, selected the partition for mu windows 7 installation and chose 'clean' as it said. After that nothing worked. The Windows 7 and another partition were gone off the drive.

 

I attempted a few things, even gparted couldn't see any partitions, just a uninitialized disk. Creating the partitions worked and I was able to install XP on the disk. But attempting to install Win 7 now no longer works.

 

The installer fires up and I can get to the part where you configure the disk to use, but it just states that WIndows cannot be installed onto Disk 0 Partition 1.

More info shows that it thinks that the disk is not bootable in the BIOS, where it is.

 

I have three SATA drives.

 

500GB - OS and Stuff

2x200GB in dynamic disks in windows raid.

 

I saw that they state that sometimes the other disks cause this issue, but even with the 500GB on it's own it still fails.

 

The SATA interface is set up in the BIOS and set to Native IDE, which is what it's always been.

 

I've tried 32 and 64 Bit windows 7, but it's a combined disk so the interface is the same.

 

This installed OK about two weeks ago..

 

Anyone with any ideas?

 

Cheers,

 

Paul.

[SUPRALOOPY]

Have you tried tuning it off and on again??? (joking)

[creative]

boot into a live distro of linux and format the drive that way?

 

are the drives in the right order in bios? I recently struggled to get my desktop to boot after a bit of tinkering and the bios was reading the OS drive as being a slave and not primary. reset the order in bios, reset the boot order and away I went again.

[MaveriK]

FWIW You will sometimes find USB controllers stop working, sometimes they are borked but sometimes they are just holding a charge that you need to get rid of. Turning your system off AND disconnecting the power cord and then leaving for a few minutes will remove the held charge and allow the controller to work correctly again.

 

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html

 

I used this thread when i set my laptop up, hope it helps.

[MrRalphMan]

Hi all, sorry for the late reply but just got back from a week in Turkey.

 

I've used gparted to initialise the disk, format the partitions etc, but I still get the same error.

I can install xp fine, just windows 7 not playing ball.

 

Drives seem to be set up ok in the bios, but I'll double check that.

 

The Usb controller it's known not to work with windows 7 64 bit, so I want to install 32 bit.

 

Still something to do tomorrow and hack the mrs off with.