Windows can't be installed on this drive (Win 8.1 Pro)

[freelancer.jrooney]

Hi,

I recently bought a PC from a friend of mine.

It has three drives (two SSDs and one HDD) that had Windows 8.1 installed on one, and Ubuntu installed on another. My friend had created a number of different partitions on the drive.

I booted from the Windows 8.1 install disk to attempt a complete reformat and clean install of Windows. I selected Custom install and deleted/formatted all three drives at the 'Where do you want to install Windows?' screen until the only things in the list were 'Drive 0 Unallocated Space', 'Drive 1 Unallocated Space' and 'Drive 2 Unallocated Space'.

The problem is I can't install Windows to any of these drives (I want to install it to one of the SSDs). The error message I get is:

'Windows can't be installed on this drive.'

When I click 'Show Details' it says:

'Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu.'

I've searched around online for solutions and I've tried a few different things. First of all I used the diskpart function to clean all three of the drives. This didn't work, although seemed to be the solution to a lot of other people with this problem.

I then created a new partition of Drive 0 (using the entire drive capacity) but that didn't work. After doing that the initial error message changes to 'Windows can't be installed on drive 0 partition 1', although the 'Show Details' button displays the same longer error message as mentioned above.

I also tried changing the SATA configuration in the BIOS from AHCI to IDE, but that just made the boot process soooo slow.

There's an option on this screen to 'Load Driver' - could it be that I need to reinstall drivers for them?

UPDATE: I installed the 64-bit RAID driver from the motherboard CD as someone had suggested this as an answer on another thread, but that didn't work either.

Hope that question has enough detail! Desperate to get this working as I've never been able to play a game newer than 2012! Send help!

Thanks in advance.

John

 

[freelancer.jrooney]

MERGED QUESTION
Question from freelancer.jrooney : "Windows can't be installed on this drive (Win 8.1 Pro)"

Hi,

I recently bought a PC from a friend of mine.

It has three drives (two SSDs and one HDD) that had Windows 8.1 installed on one, and Ubuntu installed on another. My friend had created a number of different partitions on the drive.

I booted from the Windows 8.1 install disk to attempt a complete reformat and clean install of Windows. I selected Custom install and deleted/formatted all three drives at the 'Where do you want to install Windows?' screen until the only things in the list were 'Drive 0 Unallocated Space', 'Drive 1 Unallocated Space' and 'Drive 2 Unallocated Space'.

The problem is I can't install Windows to any of these drives (I want to install it to one of the SSDs). The error message I get is:

'Windows can't be installed on this drive.'

When I click 'Show Details' it says:

'Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu.'

I've searched around online for solutions and I've tried a few different things. First of all I used the diskpart function to clean all three of the drives. This didn't work, although seemed to be the solution to a lot of other people with this problem.

I then created a new partition of Drive 0 (using the entire drive capacity) but that didn't work. After doing that the initial error message changes to 'Windows can't be installed on drive 0 partition 1', although the 'Show Details' button displays the same longer error message as mentioned above.

I also tried changing the SATA configuration in the BIOS from AHCI to IDE, but that just made the boot process soooo slow.

There's an option on this screen to 'Load Driver' - could it be that I need to reinstall drivers for them?

UPDATE: I installed the 64-bit RAID driver from the motherboard CD as someone had suggested this as an answer on another thread, but that didn't work either.

Hope that question has enough detail! Desperate to get this working as I've never been able to play a game newer than 2012! Send help!

Thanks in advance.

John

P.S I also posted this in the Windows 8 forum as I wasn't sure which was the best forum for it.