Hi, I have a hard drive that has been partitioned many times by different partition tools including OSX which I believe to be the culprit. At the moment I cannot install Windows 7 or 8 as it says it cannot create a partition or find one. This has happened to me before and in the past I have booted the OSX installer and repartitioned it using MBR instead of GUID, this has always worked in the past. This time it wouldn't work, I then tried GParted, and then disk part using ; Start DISKPART. Type LIST DISK and identify your SSD disk number (from 0 to n disks). Type SELECT DISK <n> where <n> is your SSD disk number. Type CLEAN Type CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY Type ACTIVE Type FORMAT FS=NTFS QUICK Type ASSIGN None of these have worked Any ideas what I can try next? Mike
Have you tried zero out the disk? dban or active disk should do it. or you could use mbr tool, that could redo mbr and set it back to normal. just delete mbr, and then redo mbr, to set it back to normal, if all else fails.
I've tried KillDisk in the past and it made no difference until I partitioned it with MBR instead of GUID. If I get no other suggestions I'll try Kill disk again. Mike
* Use s1ave77 suggestion: Select partition 1 * Boot from Windows 7/8 ISO DVD/USB and at first installation dialogue, press Shift+F10 for command prompt. Repeat partitioning steps in following order: diskpart list disk select disk n convert mbr (convert gpt if want to use gpt) clean create partition primary select partition 1 active format fs=ntfs exit
Hmm, convert mbr comes up with an error telling me it cannot be converted, I'll have to try some other tools. Mike
After trying every tool I could find I got it to work by unplugging the other hard drives so that it was the only one. Worked first time after that. There's several hours of my life gone that I won't get back! Mike
Good to know that things are working now for you. So it was your Mobo SATA Port/BIOS problem, nothing to do with diskpart component.
The solution being that you unplugged the other disks doesn't necessarily mean the board is bad, could also be the other drives. As for there being a problem with the partition cable, here's a tip for those suggesting all kinds of different Linux distros and third-party tools. Sometimes data will get written to the beginning of the disk which Windows can't deal with for whatever reason. Using diskpart works fine if you change "clean" to "clean all". This makes it zerofill the disk, and usually a few seconds is enough to overwrite the problem data. After it's been running for 5-10 seconds you can just unplug the data cable and plug it back in, then restart the process using just "clean," this way you don't have to wait several hours for it to actually fill the entire disk. It works great on SATA/USB disks, your results with PATA will vary depending on which chipset/OS/driver version you have. Quite a few people don't know that SATA is hotpluggable; PATA isn't but modern computers deal much better with it than older ones. You can also use this as an alternative to writing the correct bootsector when making USB drives bootable. Here's an example. Code: Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7601 Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Microsoft Corporation. On computer: ***********-PC DISKPART> list disk Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt -------- ------------- ------- ------- --- --- Disk 0 Online 119 GB 0 B Disk 1 Online 931 GB 0 B Disk 2 Online 7633 MB 7632 MB Disk 3 No Media 0 B 0 B Disk 4 No Media 0 B 0 B Disk 5 No Media 0 B 0 B Disk 6 No Media 0 B 0 B Disk 7 No Media 0 B 0 B DISKPART> sel disk 2 Disk 2 is now the selected disk. DISKPART> clean all DiskPart has encountered an error: The system cannot find the file specified. See the System Event Log for more information. This is the error you'll see when the drive is unplugged. Plug it back in and wait for it to be visible in Device Manager or Disk Management, then continue. Code: DISKPART> list disk Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt -------- ------------- ------- ------- --- --- Disk 0 Online 119 GB 0 B Disk 1 Online 931 GB 0 B Disk 2 Online 7633 MB 0 B Disk 3 No Media 0 B 0 B Disk 4 No Media 0 B 0 B Disk 5 No Media 0 B 0 B Disk 6 No Media 0 B 0 B Disk 7 No Media 0 B 0 B DISKPART> sel disk 2 Disk 2 is now the selected disk. DISKPART> clean DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk. DISKPART> create part pri DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition. DISKPART> format fs=fat32 quick 100 percent completed DiskPart successfully formatted the volume. DISKPART> active DiskPart marked the current partition as active. DISKPART> exit Now you have a USB drive with MBR and a single FAT32 partition ready to boot into Windows Vista/7/8 setup, just copy the files from the CD/ISO.
If you create the partition with Windows Setup it will automatically deal with 4K drives and SSD offsets properly.