I have a machine running ubuntu 11.04 and I also have a spare hard drive installed in the computer. I formatted it through the Ubuntu GUI following the steps outlined here . The setup failed to install because it said I did not have a NTFS formatted hard disk. I tried formatting it through the windows setup however it returned the same error message.

It sounds like you're trying to install Windows 7 on the spare hard drive, correct?

If so, start Ubuntu with the spare drive attached and open gparted. Use gparted to remove all partitions from the extra drive (assuming that there is nothing on that drive that you want to keep - if there is data you want to keep, back up the drive first). Make sure you choose the correct drive in gparted or you could wipe out your Ubuntu installation.

Once you've removed all partitions from the spare drive, reboot try to install Windows 7 again.