Windows Setup cannot format physical disk

[Mondoswank]

Hi,

I am running Win7 Ultimate as a host with Win7 Home premium as a guest, with the VM using a physical disk so I can do a sysprep and install this Win7HP into another machine later. After plenty of fudging around to get my physical disk recognized, and using Host I/O cache to stop an error during install, now Window starts copying files, but then stops and says that it cannot format the disk. Nor delete the partition, or really anything related to modifying this disk. Anyone come across this or have any ideas? Thanks in advance!

[socratis]

anything related to modifying this disk

Do you mean the disk that you actually booted from?

[Mondoswank]

No, I am booting from a Win7HP iso, and trying to install windows to a physical hard disk. Screengrab of system setup attached

[Martin]

See the warning at http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk
Raw hard disk access is for expert users only. You need to know yourself how to make sure that your host Windows os completely releases access to the disk.

[Mondoswank]

See the warning at
Raw hard disk access is for expert users only. You need to know yourself how to make sure that your host Windows os completely releases access to the disk.

Thanks. While I am new to VM, I know what I am doing. It looked like removing the drive in Disk Management might have worked, at least it took longer before failing to repartition the drive.

If anyone has an actual suggestion, it would be welcome.

[mpack]

Yes, I would actually suggest ditching the raw access idea and creating the VM in the normal way, using a VDI image file to represent the disk. The goals you outlined in your first post do not require the use of a raw disk, and in fact a raw disk will make it very much harder to accomplish your goal (basically: the raw disk has several partitions not required for your sysprepped image, which will complicate distributions of the sysprepped image).

What you should do instead is create a normal Win7 VM, sysprep it, then image it from the inside (using e.g. Disk2VHD), writing the image to a shared folder or USB drive.

[Mondoswank]

Yes, I would actually suggest ditching the raw access idea and creating the VM in the normal way, using a VDI image file to represent the disk. The goals you outlined in your first post do not require the use of a raw disk, and in fact a raw disk will make it very much harder to accomplish your goal (basically: the raw disk has several partitions not required for your sysprepped image, which will complicate distributions of the sysprepped image).

What you should do instead is create a normal Win7 VM, sysprep it, then image it from the inside (using e.g. Disk2VHD), writing the image to a shared folder or USB drive.

I actually tried this first, but sysprep continually crashed. The only thing I found as a fix was a hotfix that should have been part of windows update, so I updated evrything yet it still crashed.

My raw disk has only one partition. This is a disk directly connected internally, so that I can install Win7HP and then sysprep it.

[mpack]

Sysprep isn't doing any magic, all it does is modify a few files inside the guest. There's no reason for it to crash. I would try to pin that problem down rather than create new ones. If such a basic application is crashing you don't want to copy the VM anyway.

[Mondoswank]

So, I think this is all related, but no idea where to start to figure out what is actually happening. I decided eff it, I'll just unplug all my system drives and reboot my machine to install Win7HP to this disk, run the sysprep and just bypass VM altogether. However, the windows install still doesn't recognize the disk, which seems a lot like what was happening using the physical disk in VM. I just went to delete the partition of this disk in Disk Management (everything is showing up fine) and it's giving me an "in use" error, and this makes me wonder if the reason the VM couldn't install to it, partition it, etc, is that somewhere, somehow it's still in use (it was initially reformatted on my Linux box connected via USB, but I am pretty sure I ejected it). There is literally nothing running on my machine other than my browser, so I don't know what can be using the disk. The disk is recognized in windows, and I can copy to it, delete, etc. I opened Resource Monitor and there doesn't appear to be anything going on with this disk.

So, I am going to plug it back into my Linux box and try reformatting and see if that helps. Very weird.

[Mondoswank]

I just rebuilt the partition table in Gparted, reformatted and no change. Win7 install prompts for drivers, install sata drivers, and disk is still not recognized, exactly as before. So flippin weird.

[Mondoswank]

Ok, just putting this here because this is totally crazy, in case someone else has the same problem.

Initially, I installed win7HP in Vbox to a virtual drive using a USB boot disk that I created. The OEM windows disk that I had was too big for my flash drive, so I went in and removed all the language packs and created a new boot USB disk. This worked fine to install to the VM virtual drive. It did not, however, work anywhere else; not on the physical drive in VBox, and not when I installed the drive into two different machines. The second machine had a DVD player, so I was able to try the Windows CD and lo and behold no errors, everything installed fine. Which makes zero sense because I only deleted the language packs, and the error that I kept getting was that it was looking for drivers, presumably for the sata controller but now I have no idea what it was actually doing.

I am absolutely stumped why this didn't happen with the virtual drive, but whatever, I was able to install win7 from the DVD and sysprep it, so all good now. Computers.