Saturday, December 09, 2006

Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation

I had a hard time installing Windows Vista on my old machine (hey, my machine is older than a year... and hey! I have been blogging for over a year!!) anyway... oh, the error message, I kept getting that error when trying to install to any of the (3) partitions on my SATA drive, I deleted them, formatted them, recreated them, nothing worked... one guy had posted a vague answer to this very problem: "Vista should be installed on active partition", what the h* is that supposed to mean?

on one last desperate attempt, I disconnected the other drive (that I didn't mention before) from my machine, leaving only the SATA drive connected, ran the installation and voila!, that's all I needed to do, the installation ran smooth after that, everything is working great so far, I think I even like IE7 a lot better in Vista and Aero Glass is sweet canadian mullet!

here are some shortcuts keys for you guys new to Vista

and hopefully my experience will be helpful to some other soul, now if you excuse me I got some playing to do, next stop: Office 2007 baby

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks for the tip. I have 2 Sata Raid arrays, (one Nvraid and the other Silicon Image) and Vista was giving the same "windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation" error. After reading your post, I disabled the Silicon Image RAID array in the BIOS, leaving only the NVidia Sata Raid, and voila.. Vista is installing perfectly..

This is with a Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard with 1 terrabyte on the Silicon Image raid and 500 gigs on the Nvidia raid.