unable to install windows 7 in my laptop with no os

Question

I have a the following message when i try to install windows 7 through an bootable USB..

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

I will explain the things I did to my lenovo y500 laptop.The laptop was initially working with 2 os .. ubuntu linux and windows vista which came with the laptop..

What I tried to do is to install the windows 7 through USB and when it asksed for the option which drive to install, It showed me all the drives available including the C: and the vista reserved drive.. Since I wanted a fresh install, I deleted all the partitions and tried to install the new windows 7 but got the above said message. currently I have no os and cannot install anything too..

Now I dont know what to do.. I googled for the issue but none of the answers helped me..I tried to do the diskpart using command prompt and it did not help..

can someone guide me in this ?

Thanks..

Answer 1

I think you didn't partitioning correctly. My suggest is partition you hard with Gparted on Ubuntu live and after that install your Windows .

you can download Ubuntu from here: Ubuntu Download

Answer 2

Before you go to the drive / partition selection screen, press Shift+F10 on your keyboard. You will get a command prompt window. Yes, we are using diskpart again, but we will clean your hard drive and not create new partitions with it (which is what you've probably tried before and didn't work).

• There, type diskpart.
• Type list disk to show a list of drives. Find out the one on which you want to install Windows (according to the disk size) and remember the drive number.
• Type select disk drive number (you can additionally check the selected drive by typing list disk again and having a look at the asterisk which defines the now selected disk.
• You are now going to completely remove the existing partitions of this harddrive, e.g. loosing the data on it. Just said this to make sure you're not surprised afterwards! E.g., type clean.
• After this has been done, close the command prompt window (or type exit twice) and proceed to the drive selection screen.

Hopefully, Windows can work with this "clean" unpartitioned drive now.

If this still does not help, I would boot with a Partition Magic CD. It has a disk eraser utility in the desktop icons it will show you after booting up, which is also used to reset SSDs to their factory defaults and helped me erasing disks completely too.