Windows 7 Install Failure

[Pictman]

I have installed Windows 7 Enterprise on 9 PCs without a problem. Today I tried to install on another machine but the installation failed during 'expanding files'. The error report was that Windows could not prepare my computer to restart. This was a custom install on a machine running Windows XP Pro. I have tried chkdsk c:/f and also unplugging all devices except mouse, screen and keyboard. Any ideas please?

Thank you for reading this.

 

[aich69]

I have found that Win7 fails to install if the disk is pre-formatted with NTFS.
Case in point.. I took a 320Gb SATA drive and formatted it through Disk Management, removed it from the PC and put it into another machine to install Win7 on it. It was a spare drive so it was as good as any other.
Win7 wouldn't install, it gave me same erros message as you got. So I took it out and attached to PC using USB/SATA cable, deleted the partition leaving it as unallocated, put it back in and Win7 installed fine. It's not the first time I've had this issue where it won't install onto a disk already formatted. Don't know if that helps in any way but it sounds similar to your scenario/error message.


I used to have a handle on life... but it broke. Cpt. Red Bull

 

[vacunita]

Win 7 requires some unallocated space to create what I can only assume is a swap partition of around 200Mb if I'm not mistaken.

If your hard drive is fully partitioned, that is there is no unallocated space it cannot create this partition thus failing.

I had the exact same problem on mine.

I had to remove all partition information and leave the drive as unallocated for Win 7 to install.

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Phil AKA Vacunita
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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[linney]

Just some Google links on this problem.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Wind...-au&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1