marshallpenguin Posted July 26, 2008 Share Posted July 26, 2008 I have tried for several hours to get vista to work with my hard drive but to no avail. I created a partition and formatted it but when I try to install it it says "Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation": unhelpful resolutions on microsofts site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927520 (only difference is that I CAN select and format it.)I have the ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI and a SATA HD.I tried getting the drivers from asus's site that had the description:"Make ATI RAID/AHCI Vista32 Driver for Windows Vista 32bit&Vista 64bit"But I couldn't find any drivers in that download.I also tried using the DriveMaker exe that was on the drivers cd that came with the motherboard,,, but evidently you need a floppy disk drive in order to use it (how dumb is that?) and it so happens that I didn't order one of those with my computer As I said I've spent hours trying to get this to work. I'm posting this here in high hopes that someone will know the solution. If not I plan on getting na IDE hard drive which I'd really rather not do as I like my large, fast and silent SATA hard drive.I hope someone can help me!Thanks!Joey Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marshallpenguin Posted July 26, 2008 Author Share Posted July 26, 2008 Oh, I also tried the drivers with the description:"AMD AHCI Compatible RAID Controller Driver V3.1.1540.10 for Windows 32/64bit Vista."But that didn't work either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Th3_uN1Qu3 Posted July 26, 2008 Share Posted July 26, 2008 It's not the drivers. I've had that too... You have to wipe your whole HDD and let Vista partition and format it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marshallpenguin Posted July 26, 2008 Author Share Posted July 26, 2008 I don't like that idea. NEXT!!! I really don't want to do that (I'm actually a linux user it's just that I need vista for testing and packaging software I write) but I will if I have to. So are you absolutely sure that that is what needs to be done? I do have two partitions on my HDD one of which IS formatted to ntfs. Are you sure when you did it it wasn't because your partitions were fat32 (Sorry for not trusting you but I'd really rather not wipe my hdd, and if I do it would be very VERY frustrating if vista still didn't install).Thank you very much for your reply!Joey Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marshallpenguin Posted July 26, 2008 Author Share Posted July 26, 2008 Well, I'm trying it. I'll post here how it works out.To be a bit more verbose about it in case it all works out and this can help someone:I changed my bios settings to use AHCI and that didn't work. Although the vista setup DID finally recognize the drivers I got off of asus's site. So I tried setting it to RAID (it was just SATA at first). Windows Vista did NOT recognize the disk drive that time until after I loaded the AHCI/RAID driver. So this leads me to believe that, and the windows help page mentions this as a possible solution, that a HDD wipe IS needed. Because vista does detect the HDD and can format/partition etc - it just won't install on to it.Hopefully this will work. I'm not exactly thrilled that I have to wipe my HDD but thankfully Linux is dead simple to install (I pop the cd in and the full OS runs!) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marshallpenguin Posted July 26, 2008 Author Share Posted July 26, 2008 Alright. It worked. I'm just glad to finally have it installing! Thanks for your help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CoffeeFiend Posted July 26, 2008 Share Posted July 26, 2008 I changed my bios settings to use AHCI and that didn't work.AHCI mode can be problematic, it depends on the chipset and drives... So I tried setting it to RAID (it was just SATA at first)That's intended for when you want to use RAID, so normally that wouldn't work.Windows Vista did NOT recognize the disk drive that time until after I loaded the AHCI/RAID driverDepends on the chipset, some newer chipsets that came out after Vista did will need this for sure.thankfully Linux is dead simple to install (I pop the cd in and the full OS runs!)If all your hardware is supported by it, then it can be. But then again, if Vista supports your hardware out of the box (like any intel chipset) it's no harder. I have yet to need a driver to install it. XP is much like Vista, except it comes with only a tiny minority of the drivers Vista does, and that it expects a floppy in case they're not on there (it's only bearable because you can add them on the CD by hand). Surely it can' be that hard to load drivers on a USB flash drive and to tell Vista to use those... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DigeratiPrime Posted July 27, 2008 Share Posted July 27, 2008 1) verify that your BIOS detects the drive when its connected.2) use AHCI if possible3) If Vista has the drivers it should detect your drive4) format it with the appropriate filesystemIf Vista does not detect it in AHCI mode, you need to either load the drivers from a drive Vista can recognize, integrate the drivers and build a new install source, or try using IDE mode in the BIOS. BTW what edition of Vista are you using and is it SP1?vLite (freeware) makes it pretty simple to integrate the drivers and do other things:http://www.vlite.net/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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