Problem with reinstalling Vista

Question

I have just purchased a Dell Inspiron 6400. The HDD was split up in four partitions: a small Dell diagnostics partition, the 10 GB PC Restore partition, an 80 GB Vista Home Premium partition and a 2 GB MediaDirect partition. My intention is to create a dual boot Vista/Linux system. There are already four primary partitions on the HDD, so there have to be some changes. My plan was to keep the diagnostics and MediaDirect partitions. I wanted to remove the PC Restore and Vista partitions, replacing them by a new 60GB Vista partition and a 30GB Linux partition. I already reformatted the PC Restore partition (having the Windows Vista DVD and Dell driver disc, I felt confident I can reinstall Vista myself) and shrunk the Vista partition by 30GB. The further partitioning (combining the former PC Restore partition with the Vista partition) of the drive I wanted to perform from the Vista install process. A long introduction to my real problem: I can start up the Windows Vista DVD but when the install process reaches the screen in which I have to choose the partition I want to install Vista on, I get an error box saying the following (it's translated from Dutch so bear with me here): Unexpected installation error. Check if the installation resources are available and restart the installation. Error code: 0xE0000100. When I click the OK button I get redirected back to the first screen of the installation. Behind the error box, I can see the screen to select the partition. It is empty however and near the bottom of the screen it says (again translated from Dutch): No drives found. Click on Load Driver if you want to load a driver for mass storage. I can click the Load Driver link (even though the error box is not closed) which leads me to a screen where I can browse my computer to find drivers (very strange: here the installation process *does* show several partitions). However, I cannot find these drivers on my computer. I thought the problem was related to the well-known RAID/Vista problems and following the instructions I found on this forum I put the correct SATA drivers (Intel 945M chipset, it's the Intel 82801 GBM/GHM (ICH7-M family) storage controller according to the device manager in Windows) on a USB stick and tried loading them. The install process says these are not compatible however and if I try to install them anyway, the install process redirects me to the first screen of the installation. Does anyone have any idea what the cause of this problem is? Or even if the error box and the installation not finding drives are one and the same problem of two completely different ones? I have spend all day today trying to figure out what's wrong but don't seem to get any closer to finding a solution. Message Edited by ash42 on 04-07-2007 12:54 PM

ash42 · Answer

At first glance (I'm still reading it) this article seems to describe problems when you repartition from Linux. Let me make it clear that I haven't done anything from Linux yet. All changing of partitions happened from Vista's disk administration tool.

Mary G · Answer

Although I don't think you should be dual booting on a notebook computer with Vista, this might be the problem: http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/about78184.html

ash42 · Answer

Although the article did not describe my situation, it put me on the right track: the 30 GB of diskspace I cleared in Vista for later use in Linux weren't formatted and apparently Vista's installer can't deal with that. After I gave the 30 GB back to the current Vista partition, the installer worked. Problem solved :) Thanks for your help!

didi6107 · Answer

I got the same error when I tried to reinstall Vista after having reduced the main partition (OS). How can I manage then to change the partitions, either to split the windows area to have the system, my applications, my data or to install linux ?

ash42 · Answer

If you still have the old install of Vista, give the empty space back to the OS partition (using Vista's partition manager) and try to reinstall. You can re-partition your HDD during the installation of Vista. This worked for me.

I'm not sure, but I think the exact reason the Vista install process failed was because of the fact that I didn't format the empty space: it was just empty (RAW) and wasn't formatted with a certain filesystem (like NTFS of FAT). So your second option could be to try and format the empty space (using Vista's partition manager).

If you haven't got the old install, I'm not sure what you could do. You could try and format the HDD with a certain filesystem and then try to reinstall but I'm not sure if that works, so you'd be on your own in this case.

Hope this helps.

didi6107 · Answer

Yes, ash42, that helped. I didn't format the empty space because I couldn't. I got an error message. And the eason for that is that on a DELL Inspiron 6400, the system uses already 4 partitions. So I can't split the C partition to create new ones unless I delete the recovery one or the Dell Media Direct one. Thank you.

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