Installing Windows 8 Professional

[sinsi]

Install from scratch, not an update. What a major hassle

Start setup, enter key. Get to the choose disk, I choose disk.
Windows says unable to create partition. Go to advanced, create a partition.
Select the NEW PARTITION THAT SETUP MADE and get unable to create partition.

Apparently, if you have more than one hard drive, Windows 8 setup goes blond.
Even a bloody SD card left in the drive can do this.

Solution: disconnect other drives, setup goes smoothly. Installed from a flash drive so in 15 minutes it's ready.
Shut down, reconnect other drives, Windows boots normally and shows the new drives. Still wasted a day chasing down the problem.

[Adamanteus]

 That's you not forget that in BIOS exist primary hard drive, so active Windows partition could be only there ...

[Vortex]

Hi sinsi,

Did you try to access the command prompt by hitting SHIFT+F10? You could run the diskpart command to manage partitions.

[sinsi]

Here is the time-wasting that I went through

From setup (each one is preceded by 1:pick language 2:type key, and is followed by a restart)
Use existing NTFS drive
Delete existing, use drive
Delete existing, create new, format

Same steps using repair instead of install, plus using diskpart


Adamanteus, the new board has SATA only, so there is no problem with primary/secondary.
Windows will usually install onto a secondary anyway, with boot files on the primary.

[Adamanteus]

 I and mean active Windows partition on primary when installs, boot loader on the primary installing after installation of Windows on secondary. So when install is need to switch drives, except use preinstallation kit. I basically had no problems installing on machine with few drives.