Problem installing Win7 from a flash drive...

Here's an interesting problem I ran into: It seems it's not possible to install Win7 (Pro, in case that matters) onmy Dell Precision 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 did 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...

 

Tried removing the memory stick after the first phase or changing the boot order to your HD first?

1st phase just copies the setup files over to your HD if i recall.

 

You can recreate the system reserved partition as i had to as I kept getting errors whilst running a system backup. It involved a bit of work, but was pretty painless.

Create a partition, between say 100mb and 500mb and assign a drive letter say F:, make sure it is a primary partition as you will need to make it active later on. (windows creates one at 100mb, but this has given people including me problems with windows backup, so I created mine at 500mb).

If windows is installed on C: then run in an elevated command prompt:

bcdboot.exe C:\Windows /s F: (change F: to whatever drive letter you assigned your newly created partition),

Again, in an elevated command prompt run DISKPART

In the DISKPART command prompt run these 2 commands:

1. select volume F:

2. active

Hopefully, all being well, you should be able to reboot the machine, and this will then become your system partition.

Once this is done, and all is working well, you can then go into disk management, and remove the drive letter from the partition as you will have no need for the partition.

 

Yes, none of that helps. The problem is that the installer does not create the needed system partition when I run it from the memory stick. If I remove the stick after the first phase of the install, then the machine will just stop with an error message saying that the boot loader is not found.

Hmm, that is interesting! What kind of errors where you getting, and why?

Alright, I'll give it a full gig then. I have plenty of space in this machine.

Is there a way to get a command prompt from the installation DVD (or memory stick)? Otherwise the above assumes that I already have Windows on the machine, which I don't. Ideally, what I'd like to do is, starting with a virgin hard drive, create a 1gig system partition, plus whatever additional partitions I want, and then install Windows. Any pointers on how to achieve this?

 

When installed on my daughter's netbook, had to go into the bios and change the boot order after the first re-start- else you'll get into the endless loop you're describing. Then it should finish the installation on the hard drive.

 

Unfortunately, that is not my issue. In my case, the Windows installer simply never creates the necessary system partition. I have a hunch that this failure is related to the somewhat non-trivial way my hard dives are set up, which uses the Matrix RAID capabilities of my controller to create two different RAID arrays on my drives. In any case, it seems I will be able to resolve my issue following the procedures outlined here.

 

This will not help as you are installing Win 7 Pro which does not have bitlocker and thus does not need to create the partition at all. This workaround, as stated in the description itself, is for Win7 Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise editions, nothing to do with Pro.

 

My issue has nothing to do with the unencrypted partition needed for Bitlocker. All versions of Windows 7, when installed on an empty hard drive, will create a small hidden system partition, which contains some system recovery tools as well. My problem is due to the failure of the Windows installer to set the partition it just installed Windows on as active. Using one of the approaches described on the page I linked to indeed allows me to correct this issue.

 

Basically, no hack is needed, just a simple tool to partition the hard drive the right way prior to installation.

 

Oh yes, I agree. The word "hack" that is used in the article I linked to is probably a bit too strong anyway.

I would still be curious to know why I have this issue, and why this only happens when I try and install from a flash drive.

 

Quick update, just in case someone else runs into this issue: After looking around on the web, it seems what I am seeing is a very common problem, to the point that I think this is in fact a bug in the Win7 installer, plain and simple. It looks like this issue is almost certain to appear whenever people try to install Win7 on a machine with multiple hard drives. Such configurations are somewhat rare for laptops, which explains that we haven't seen many reports of this problem on these forums here.

 

I had a laptop with 2 hard drives. I installed win 7 from a USB stick and had no problems with it.

 

Where the drives empty?

 

Both were partitioned with data on them.

 

Hmm, so it's not as straightforward. Oh well, given that I can simply install from the DVD, I have spent about as much time on investigating this as I care to. I'll just leave this particular mystery unsolved, then...