OMG, I CAN'T INSTALL WINDOWS. Seriously.
I am booting from a USB image of Windows 7 x64 pro made using the official Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool. The image is verified to be working because I can launch it from the USB drive from windows, and I get no errors. I boot from the USB drive, it loads setup files, and then presents the screen for selecting language/keyboard layout. I click next or ok, I forget what the button is named, but it takes me to the next screen. I am then presented with the "Install Now" option, or help/repair underneath it to the left. I click "Install now", and after a few seconds where it is attempting to load my hard drive information, I get the error message "Windows could not retrieve information about the disks on this computer", and it takes me back to the "Install now" screen.
I recently purchased a P8Z77-V LK motherboard and 256GB Samsung 830, which is the reason for a fresh install. I even booted my old windows and initialized the Samsung 830 (as MBR) and formatted it, and could copy files to/from it to verify it was fine. I have tried every combination of drives to the point where only my assuredly working previous hard drive was hooked up, and can even be booted to, and the same error message occurs when attempting to install. So it's not a bad drive, whether my new or old one. I have fiddled with the SATA settings on my new motherboard to run as IDE and AHCI, but no change. Updated my motherboard's BIOS to the newest revision, and attempted all of this over again, and still no change. Even though I verified the image to be working, I downloaded a new one, and tried it again, and still no change. I suppose the only thing I have left to try is to install my old DVD burner and burn a DVD image to try it again, but that seems like it has pretty close to 0 chance for a different result.
I have spent a significant amount of time researching this problem, and tried everything I could think of. Every post about this problem is always during an attempting upgrade from windows, and it's always the virtual disk service (the only one that was the same case as mine was on some other site's forums, and it remained unsolved). It's possible it's a hardware problem I suppose, but considering I can still boot into my old installation of windows on my old drive, and it works fine, that seemed almost impossible?
If this proves unsolvable for some reason, I CAN install it by loading it off the USB drive from my old install of windows, but I'm not sure what it does with the bootloader, and the idea is to put everything on the new SSD from scratch, thus I'm hesitant to not do a clean boot/install. It would be very unfortunate if it had to initialize my hard drive to point to the SSD as my windows installation location, where as if I boot from the drive and do it from scratch, I know it's all on the new SSD.
I am pretty much out of ideas, and totally clueless. I might try poking around the BIOS more at random, but I really looked around already, and saw nothing that seemed even remotely relevant. Anybody have any ideas?
I recently purchased a P8Z77-V LK motherboard and 256GB Samsung 830, which is the reason for a fresh install. I even booted my old windows and initialized the Samsung 830 (as MBR) and formatted it, and could copy files to/from it to verify it was fine. I have tried every combination of drives to the point where only my assuredly working previous hard drive was hooked up, and can even be booted to, and the same error message occurs when attempting to install. So it's not a bad drive, whether my new or old one. I have fiddled with the SATA settings on my new motherboard to run as IDE and AHCI, but no change. Updated my motherboard's BIOS to the newest revision, and attempted all of this over again, and still no change. Even though I verified the image to be working, I downloaded a new one, and tried it again, and still no change. I suppose the only thing I have left to try is to install my old DVD burner and burn a DVD image to try it again, but that seems like it has pretty close to 0 chance for a different result.
I have spent a significant amount of time researching this problem, and tried everything I could think of. Every post about this problem is always during an attempting upgrade from windows, and it's always the virtual disk service (the only one that was the same case as mine was on some other site's forums, and it remained unsolved). It's possible it's a hardware problem I suppose, but considering I can still boot into my old installation of windows on my old drive, and it works fine, that seemed almost impossible?
If this proves unsolvable for some reason, I CAN install it by loading it off the USB drive from my old install of windows, but I'm not sure what it does with the bootloader, and the idea is to put everything on the new SSD from scratch, thus I'm hesitant to not do a clean boot/install. It would be very unfortunate if it had to initialize my hard drive to point to the SSD as my windows installation location, where as if I boot from the drive and do it from scratch, I know it's all on the new SSD.
I am pretty much out of ideas, and totally clueless. I might try poking around the BIOS more at random, but I really looked around already, and saw nothing that seemed even remotely relevant. Anybody have any ideas?
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@Straight: I actually UNPLUGGED the new SSD so ONLY my old hard drive was plugged in, which is bootable, and it STILL threw that error when attempting to install windows, so the SSD is not the culprit. But yes, all drives show up in the bios perfectly.
@Thrax: I actually booted my old install of windows and initialized it as MBR and did a fast NTFS format. I even copied files to/from it, so I'm damn sure it's working.
@Tushon: I already upgraded firmware on my motherboard to the latest. No sense it doing it to the SSD, as that is disproven as the culprit. It was plugged in to the SATA III port.
I put in a help request on Microsoft's site, as it seems possible at this point I've encountered some kind of bug in their installer.
And to confirm, load BIOS, set optimized defaults, note any other changes, and confirm that AHCI is on (not IDE-mode) for SATA ports.
@Tushon: yeah, that's a good point =P. Done.