jackmc

I have a machine that had windows installed on it. I replaced the disks (which are not bad disks; see below), but now windows fails to install.

The machine has a Gigabyte GA M55SLI-S4 motherboard (with nvidia CK804 Serial ATA, according to lspci under linux). This has 4 SATA slots, into which I put 3 disks (250G/250G/400G). I successfully installed windows onto a 20GB partition on the first disk, and linux onto the rest of the system.

Recently, I wanted to upgrade my disk space, so I backed everything up, and replaced the 4 disks with 750G/750G/500G/500G disks, all brand new. I installed linux first, but left a 20G partition at the beginning of the first drive.

When I try to install windows into that 20GB partition, I get as far as formatting the FAT32 partition, but at 99% complete it all of a sudden chokes with the message "Setup was unable to format the partition. The disk may be damaged". The fact that linux is running just fine on the rest of the disk, and that linux can format the partition I want to use for windows tells me that the disk is fine.

One odd thing: windows setup detects the first two disks as 131072MB instead of 750, but it still displays all of the partitions it sees, which sum up to 750G. The two 500G drives it sees as 493GB, which is par for the course.

So far I have tried (with the same results, including the disk size reported, except as noted):

- Loading the SATA drivers (downloaded today from nvidia's website) using F6 and a floppy.
- Formatting the partition as fat32 from linux first (setup just hangs in this case)
- Shrinking the partition from 19077MB to 18800 MB (i.e., I removed the last 1.5% of the partition, which is where windows seems to claim that the partition is bad, since it gets to 99% complete).