Can't reformat primary drive, Windows won't reinstall

[Correction]

seems I either have a hardware problem or something very well hidden on my boot drive. This morning things wouldn't start without my entering the BIOS and manually picking my SSD as the boot drive. This worked but I got sick of it so I booted from the windows 7 disc and attempted to use their repair tools. After googling and fucking around with bootrec, partdisk and sfc I ended up with a computer that barked 'BOOTMGR is Missing' at me.

Fuck.

So I try to reinstall

"Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. See the Setup log files for more information."

Fuck

can't find the log files

Setup reports no errors when reformatting the drive.

What the fuck am I missing?

[xopher]

Go into your bios and change your drive to ATA from AHCI. You likely won't get your old partition back but this will at least allow your BIOS to see the drive.

[Correction]

the bios can see the drive, it's just that Windows goes derp and says 'nope can't use this go see the setup log files we didn't write to your drives anywhere.'
Reseated cables, moved cables, nothing.

[xopher]

Did you change from AHCI to ATA? This controls how the BIOS presents the drive to Windows.

[Correction]

doesn't seem to be an option. The BIOS gives me 3 choices besides "Disabled"
IDE Mode
AHCI Mode
RAID Mode

[orinthia]

The windows disc should have something to fix bootmgr. I know I've used it to do this a couple times before, but it's been long enough ago that I don't remember what exactly I did... Should have some other options instead of just install when booting from the disc. One of those should be something like startup repair or repair install. Repair install is a good option if your install is simply borked, but you may have a worse problem.

I don't have an ssd and haven't had that kind of odd issue you mentioned before you messed with things further. I would try hooking the hdd to either another computer and getting files off it (if you have things you want to save anyway) or getting a boot disc and poking around. Hiren's boot cd comes to mind, though it's last version is from 2012 and is a bit bloated in size. It's a good boot disc with a huge amount of tools, though not sure if it has ssd drivers or not in it.

[Correction]

the disk only had windows and WoW on it, the data isn't valuable.
I've run the startup repair and it fails to fix anything. It claims it has created a system partition but when it reboots and relaunches into windows recovery I get the same problems when installing.
I've run the command line tools to see if I can create the partitions manually (DISKPART) and that didn't help the install, same problem.
Before I reformatted the drive I ran the MBR repair tool (bootrec, I thnk) and it would say shit like 'Element not found' when trying to rebuild the MBR. This made me suspect the hardware but CHKDSK found no bad sectors and it certainly had no problems scanning for the existing windows installation prior to the reformat.
Right now the only thing I'm trying to do is install windows, and it blocks that operation for stupid reasons.

[xopher]

Select IDE. That's simply legacy operation. Not sure why they labeled it that way instead of ATA.

[orinthia]

Delete all the partitions on the drive and let the installer make a new one. It should be completely "unpartitioned data" or something, and then choose it to install with (or let it format it with default settings). Windows since vista needs a tiny partition to put various things in, and that partition is made upon install. It's probably complaining that it can't make this partition, but it's been a while and I could be wrong. You may have already tried that though, so I'm a bit stumped if something like that doesn't work.

Doesn't sound like the hardware is bad though if you can chkdsk, scandisk, etc and such.

[Correction]

Windows is reinstalling, unplugging all the SATA devices except for my SSD and my DVD drive helped Windows stop sucking for long enough to recognize the system partition on the SSD. 2013 and we can't get a decent OS installer from Microsoft yet, I am disappoint.

[xopher]

Did you ever change your hard drive settings to ide.

[Correction]

no

[Arkanna]

Why not? Xopher is knowledgeable and his solution was likely to be correct. Beyond that, fixboot and fixmbr might have fixed it if he was wrong.

[xopher]

2013 and we can't get a decent OS installer from Microsoft yet, I am disappoint.

Not a problem with the installer. Your inability to follow instructions leads me to believe it was likely user error in some way or another.

[Ratatapa]

Code 18

I do understand not everyone knows the IDE and AHCI, but man he told you 2-3 times

If you don't want to follow help don't ask

[Correction]

I did switch it to IDE mode for one restart, at which point my computer lost track of the DVD drive I needed to boot into the Windows 7 installer. The instructions did not help.
The fuck is going on in this thread now lol.

Code 18

I do understand not everyone knows the IDE and AHCI, but man he told you 2-3 times

If you don't want to follow help don't ask

Seriously, what is this faggotry.

[Arkanna]

I did switch it to IDE mode for one restart, at which point my computer lost track of the DVD drive I needed to boot into the Windows 7 installer. The instructions did not help.
The fuck is going on in this thread now lol.



Seriously, what is this faggotry.

Well..........

Did you ever change your hard drive settings to ide.

no

[Meresgi]

Why not? Xopher is knowledgeable and his solution was likely to be correct.

^ This, had a similar issue about a month or so ago with a client's old piece of shit Dell XP machine, simply changing the setting in the BIOS allowed the install just fine.

[Ratatapa]

I did switch it to IDE mode for one restart, at which point my computer lost track of the DVD drive I needed to boot into the Windows 7 installer. The instructions did not help.
The fuck is going on in this thread now lol.



Seriously, what is this faggotry.

Rata's been called a faggot, problem solved next case!