Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partit

Hello,

I have my HP Laptop which came with Windows Vista as the OS. I want to upgrade to Windows 7 so I bought Windows 7 from my local store.

I entered the disc and did boot from CD. It reached to the page where it shows the disk partition. I deleted the partitions and created new one. However, whenever I create the partition, it creates a primary one and gives me saying Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition.

The stupidity that I did was deleted the partition which had the Recovery Drive in it. So, now I am stuck and not able to install Vista as well as Windows 7. I am not able to boot Windows as there is no OS in my laptop now.

Really need your help here.

Please tell me what to do.

Make sure you have your BIOS set to boot from the DVD. Reboot the machine to the W7 Upgrade DVD and try one of the 3 methods listed HERE. Personally I like #3.

If it continues to tell you it cannot create a system partition then let us know.

Hello,

Ok, this is what I have done so far. I had Windows 7 disc but my laptop's dvd writer was unable to read it. So, I made a bootable USB and copied all the contents from the disc to the USB. I restarted my laptop and booted from USB. It went to the language installation page and from there to the Partition page. I tried to create a new partition and install Windows but it gave me the error message saying Setup was unable to create a System partition.

So, I came back to the language selection page, pressed Shift + F10 to open the CMD prompt. I did the diskpart and selected the disk 0, cleaned it, created one partition, formatted it, marked it active and then exited. It went to the partition page and I could see that the partition had type as System. So, I clicked Next and still got the same error message.

I removed the CMOS battery and put it back after 45 minutes. It went to BIOS and asked me to set the time and date. I did that and repeated the steps again, this time creating 2 partitions, one of 100GB and marked it as active. It went to the Partition page, I clicked Next and still got the same error.

So, basically I tried all I could find online but nothing worked. I am still stuck, my laptop does not have an OS, and I dont know what to do. I really need help solving this.

Please let me know any suggestions you have to help me.

Thanking you

If I had to guess I would say your hard drive at some point had UBUNTU or something which similarly effects the MBR.

I would suggest you try this tutorial to fix the MBR. Note where it talks about the DVDRom drive you will be looking for your flash drive with W7 on it.

When installing Windows 7 as a clean or custom install, it's necessary to ensure that only ONE partition is on the hard drive. I recommend this because the install goes much easier and less headaches, as you're experiencing now. Windows 7 is VERY fussy about having more than one partition to install to. I and a lot of other users have experienced this issue. It's a minor irritant really and once the OS is installed it's very easy to create more partitions.
Since it sounds as if the hard drive is garbled up the just use the "diskpart.exe' command during the install process and that will do a low-level reformat of the HDD. Wipe your hard drive completely clean, then in the hard drive windows of the install process create the size of partition you desire, usually 64GB is sufficient. That's taking 64,000,000 X 1.024 = 65,536,000 MB

Here's a handy tutorial: To Open a Command Prompt at Boot

Then this to engage Diskpart:
In the elevated command prompt, type diskpart and press Enter. (see screenshot below)

In the elevated command prompt, type list disk and press Enter. (see screenshot below)
NOTE: This will give you a list of disk numbers to select from.
In the elevated command prompt, type select disk # and press Enter. (see screenshot below)

NOTE: You would substitute # for the disk number listed that you want to use clean or clean all on. For example, I want to use one of them on Disk 1 (from step 1) for my USB key drive, so I would type select disk 1 and press Enter.

To Use the Clean Diskpart Command
NOTE: See the green INFO box at the top of the tutorial for more information about this command. This command will wipe the HDD quickly.

A) In the elevated command prompt, type clean and press Enter. (see screenshot below)
NOTE: This will not take long to finish. Think of it as being like a quick format.

To Use the Clean All Diskpart Command

NOTE: See the green INFO box at the top of the tutorial for more information about this command. This command will wipe the HDD, and perform a secure erase. "Clean All" takes about an hour per 320 GB to finish running. It's best to only use this command if you wanted to help make sure that the data on the HDD cannot be recovered say when giving or selling the HDD to another person.

A) In the elevated command prompt, type clean all and press Enter. You will see the command prompt below as is until the "clean all" command is finished. (see screenshot below)
NOTE: This will take quite some time (several hours or more) to finish depending on how large the disk is since it is writing over each and every sector on it to zero. Think of it as being like a full or low level format

When finished, in the elevated command prompt, type exit and press Enter. Close the elevated command prompt.

Once you create that then finish the install. Windows 7 will create a 100MB partition for its own use; don't worry about it. It's there for a reason.

When you have installed Windows 7 and all correct drivers are installed then you should go ahead and create more more partitions if you want using the Disk Management feature of the Administrative Tools section of the Control Panel. Easy and quickly done.