Cannot get vista to install on my 7200.10

[Ryland]

It is the machine in my sig which I added a Seagate 7200.10 320GB Sata drive especially for Vista. Each time I have tried to install Vista to that drive I get "Windows Setup is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation". This is really starting to piss me off since I have tried various things in combination for the last hour.

So far I have:

1) Tried having the partition already existing on the new drive, and set it to active.
2) Let Vista create the partition and format it
3) For some reason when I set Harddisk as the first boot option in the bios it stops trying to boot when it gets to that disk instead of continuing on to the 2nd boot option which is my DVD drive. This may be the problem since some messages have stated that they kept receiving this error until they made the harddisk the first boot option.
4) Set the boot order to harddisk the cdrom but when the machine is startign hit ESC to temp set the boot order to cdrom first so that my dvd starts.

Ideas?

 

[cockeyed]

A few days ago I installed the same HD on my Asus P4P800 with the Vista OS. I had 2 P-ATA HD's before and wanted Vista on the new Seagate 320gb 7200.10 S-ATA as the boot drive. I disconnected the P-ATA drives and installed the new S-ATA drive. I put the Vista disk in and tried to boot from it but it would not do anything. I then used the Seagate Wizard that I DL'd from Seagate to setup the new drive. I also set the BIOS to defaults and set the DVD as #1 in the boot order. After that, it booted from the Vista DVD for install. Once everything was running good, I re-connected one of the old P-ATA HD's (to be used for backup's) and everything is going good.

The new Seagate Wizard is made for Vista and is a nice utility to keep installed on your machine. It includes a light version of Acronis True Image backup sw that is great for making full backup's.

 

[fr]

I had a USB card reader plugged in that caused this to happen. I have no idea what it had to do with my HD, but I unplugged it and Vista installed on my HD without a problem after that.

 

[duragezic]

I had to disconnect my PATA drive to install XP or Vista to my SATA drive. With the PATA drive plugged in, the Windows setup would insist that there be a boot partition on the 250gb drive (seemed to have priority, being disk 0, over the SATA drive). So I kept it unplugged until Windows was installed then plugged it back in and all was good.

I just recently installed Vista to my SATA drive. I was expecting to possibly need the nForce4 15.00 chipset drivers on my thumbdrive (/SATAIDE/ or something like that), it didn't actually require any drivers like XP does. But in your case, try having those drivers on a thumbdrive and load them during the Vista setup.

And yeah with my SATA drive I did have to mess around with boot options that I normally didn't have to. I normally have CD-ROM has 1st option, Hard drive as 2nd, etc... but even with an active Windows install, having a CD-ROM in the drive meant it would boot from it even without ever pressing a key on the keyboard to do so.

 

[Ryland]

I do have a USB card reader installed in my computer, I guess I could give that one a shot. Maybe I will pull my removalbe PATA drive too for good measure.

 

[Ryland]

The setup that worked for me:

1) Pulled my single PATA drive (it was in a removable carrier)
2) Kept my SATA RAID-0 array plugged in
3) My boot order was Removable, CDROM, Harddisk
4) I think the Primary partition on my 7200.10 was set to active
5) Left my USB card readers plugged in

Once I pulled the PATA drive Vista64 installed without any problems.

Thanks for the help.