Cannot install Win7 from USB-stick on M6400

Here's an interesting problem I ran into: It seems it's not possible to install Win7 (Pro, in case that matters) on my M6400 from a flash drive. The problem seems to be that, when you do a fresh install on a blank hard drive, the installer must create a small system partition holding the boot manager. It does that just fine when I install from a DVD, but when I install from my flash drive, then it does not create that system partition. It's almost as if the installer figures that, hey, there's a bootable and writeable system drive present (my flash drive), so why bother. As a result, the installation from the flash drive starts just fine, but when the system reboots for the first time, it can never boot from the hard drive, and will just keep booting from the memory stick, starting over with the installation and never being able to enter the second installation phase.

Has anybody seen this issue before? Any solution for this? Did I somehow do something wrong when I created my bootable flash drive? This is not a real showstopper since I can, of course, simply install from a DVD. But it would be nice to be able to install from a flash drive...

 

worked for me just fine

maybe if you use the advanced tool (where it asks you to select what drive you want to install on)...to format the hard drive first, then create a new volume from the un allocated space.
It should then automatically create the system partition (100mb i think?) as well!

 

It sounds like the BIOS is selecting the USB drive as a priority when booting. I assume you have tried yanking the Flashdisk if it tries to restart setup again huh?

 

I'm not surprised, see below. I just wonder what the difference between your machine and mine are that could cause this different behavior.

I already know that, under certain BIOS configurations, you cannot properly install/run Win7 on the M6400, but I haven't found out yet which of the BIOS options causes that particular issue: I have seen cases where, after running the Performance Assessment in Windows 7, the system would be unbearably slow to log in (takes about 35 seconds from submitting the password at the login screen to seeing your desktop; this is on a Covet with the quad-core processor and 16gigs of memory). Once that has happened, there's no way to get the system back to normal behavior, other than a reinstall... All I am sure of so far is that this issue doesn't appear if you install using the default configuration of the BIOS. Seems that some of those modern high-end systems are getting too complex for their own good...

That's exactly what I am doing. The problem is, if I install from the DVD, the installer behaves exactly like you say. But if I install from a memory stick, it simply does not create the system partition, and the resulting install is then not bootable.

 

Ah, yes, of course, I tried that in various scenarios. The only thing that works is to first do a full install from a DVD (which will create the necessary system partition), and then re-install from the memory stick. That's a bit of a pointless exercise, though...

 

Yeah, that's real odd. And lame.

 

Hah, I think I know why I am seeing this issue, on my particular machine: I have a hunch that this failure is related to the somewhat non-trivial way my hard drives are set up, which uses the Matrix RAID capabilities of my controller to create two different RAID arrays on my drives. I have a RAID-0 array which will hold my system files and programs, and a RAID-1 array which will be used to hold my user data. This way I get both the speed advantage of RAID-0, and the safety of RAID-1 for my original data. However, it seems that this setup may confuse the Win7 installer in certain scenarios.

In any case, it seems I will be able to resolve my issue by adapting the procedures outlined here for my purposes.

 

Ah, critical information being left out.