trouble installing windows vista beta on second hard drive
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trouble installing windows vista beta on second hard drive
i have a compaq computer, pentium 4 w/512M RAM, 80G HD, cd-rw, and dvd+/-rw. it came with winXP, and after a while i added a second, 10G, hard drive, and installed Suse 10.0 onto it, dual-booting with Grub. when i found i was using Suse more than XP, i deleted my XP and installed Suse on the 80G hd. because i was no longer using XP, i took out the smaller hd. now, i have put it back in, and want to install windows vista on it. i have reformatted it with the vista installer's 'format drive' option, but then, when i try to install vista, it says something along the lines of 'windows was unable to find a system volume which meets our criteria for installation.' it is a full 10G, completely empty (theoretically) hd.
i have tried the format option with vista installer several times, and so far it hasn't worked. i have tried taking out the 80G, leaving it with only the 10G, as recommended by users at a windows help forum, but then it won't boot to anything, even to the dvd. So, another option i have considered, is to partition the 80G (i have a good 50G free, and i'd only allocate 10-15G), but i don't know how to do that, when that's the drive that my main (and currently only) OS is on. I don't want to have to go through an entire reinstall just to install vista. right now, i'm kind of at a dead end.
Windows installers have historically been very specific in their requirements; boot drive, primary partition, unformatted drive, or at least 1 Windows partition . That sort of thing.
I would have thought installing with just the small drive should work, presuming a bootable drive. Let's see the output from a "fdisk -l" from a Linux terminal with both disks installed.
(note I haven't done anything with Vista yet)
Let's see the output from a "fdisk -l" from a Linux terminal with both disks installed.
when i do this, i get:
Code:
linux:~ # fdisk -l
Disk /dev/hdb: 10.2 GB, 10262568960 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19885 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 127 1020096 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 * 128 9729 77128065 83 Linux
vgunaydin said:
Quote:
You should have more than 15 GB free space to be able to install Windows Vista B2.
as the microsoft website says, that is for the 'Windows Vista Premium Ready PC,' and not necessarily for a simple 'Windows Vista Capable PC.' however, this leads to my next question: is there a way to partition my larger drive to give Vista 15G or so, without having to reinstall my linux OS?
I was under the impression that for Vista Premium PC's you needed at least a 40 gig hdd, and for Vista Capable PC's a 20 gig hdd. In both cases 15 gigs should be available for the install.
You could use parted to partition you drives, make sure you back up all your data first though.
---
On a side note: You didn't join a Linux forum just to tell us Windows is better and ask if the beta version was free, did you? Oh, and your '.' key seems to be sticking in some of your posts, you might want to clean your keyboard up a bit.
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