Installing Win7 from USB on Thinkpad (cannot create system partition)

I have been googling and researching for a couple of days on this.

At my clients we have a bunch of Lenovos that came back from interns, ex-employees, upgrades, whatever. On some of them, they blew out the Windows partitions (recovery etc.) and put Linux or whatever. Welp, I'm tasked with getting Windows back on them. I have a Windows 7 USB key I would like to use for this purpose.

On every Thinkpad the result is the same. I can boot to the installer, get to the disk selection, and then.. "setup cannot find or create a system partition." No matter what I do to the hard drive, it reports this. I absolutely know the problem is not the hard disk or any/no partition on it, as if I switch to booting from a DVD, made from the same ISO I made the USB key from, it works perfectly.

I've narrowed down the cause. The Thinkpad blatantly makes the USB key show up to the BIOS as a "USB HDD." Windows 7's installer essentially sees two hard drives (sort of) at the moment it wants to drop the system partition, gets confused, and stops with an error. Note that the USB key doesn't show as a disk on the menu. I've tried simply unplugging the drive at that point but then Windows 7 throws up a different numbered error I dont have handy.

Has anyone run into this and maybe found a workaround? I can use a DVD if I absolutely need to, just trying to keep it quick.

 

How are you making the bootable USB drives? Are you using the official Microsoft tool, or something more ghetto?

 

I used the official Microsoft tool.

I can image non-Lenovos with this stick. I imaged my Win7 PCs at home with it.

Lenovos can activate against retail Windows 7, which makes this very convenient.

 

On my X220, I haven't been able to install Win7 with a USB stick while BIOS was set on UEFI. I had to set it to legacy mode. Maybe it will help you.

 

1. Use the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool. In my opinion, it is the most reliable tool when it comes to making a Windows 7 USB installation.

2. And go here for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 ISOs.


Sounds like your problem was coming from your questionable USB installation. I used these to do a fresh install on my E425.

 

I think your problem is there is a hidden partition on the thinkpads. Boot upth thinkpad, and press F1. In the BIOS setup menu, go to Security, and then set the IBM PreDesktop Area to "Disabled".

Now load up with your USB and delete all the partitions, then install clean

 

I absolutely know the problem is not the hard disk, nor any partition on it or not on it.

I used the official MS tool for making the USB key.

The ISO is from digital river.

These laptops don't have a UEFI toggle, and I don't think they are in UEFI mode. At least they don't act like they are.

 

Oh yea I get this problem all the time... I'm not exactly sure how the problem is fixed (I just do a whole bunch of things and then it starts working) but here is usually what I do:

Prepare the hard drive:
attach it to another system and use windows disk management to delete all the partitions and format the drive. Might need to convert from mbr to gpt or vice versa depending on if the system you want to install windows with uses legacy or uefi boot. I did a full format to possibly get rid of any 'traces' of the previous partitions... dunno if it helps.

Install system:
make sure the bios is set to legacy boot (mbr disk) or uefi (gpt disk... also make sure you modify the usb key for the uefi shell) and then boot with the usb

Everything is fine until I get to the 'select partition to install on' step.

Then, I fiddle around with deleting/creating/formatting partitions until it works, or go back to formatting the disk.

I wish I could narrow it down for you, but I don't exactly know what I am doing =P

But if it helps, on my last try (finally successful) I was doing a uefi boot with a windows 7 home premium image with the uefi shell copied into the boot folder. I had used another system to convert my ssd to gpt, which had created 2 partitions (150~mb gpt partition and 'the rest). During the install, I selected the 'everything else' partition and it gave me the error again, but then I just selected one or both (forgot which), deleted the partition, selected the "raw" area and pressed install again and it worked. It still created a 100mb system partition and I'm not sure exactly what else it did but I am going to be reinstalling the OS soon anyway so I didn't bother figuring out exactly what it did.

edit: oh yea I forgot also my sata connection was disabled in the bios so I just enabled it again. But that was a few tries before so it may or may not have had an effect. Loading the intel RST drivers first might have helped too... and make sure you are using a usb 2.0 port and not usb 3.0 port (which would give you the 'required cd/dvd drivers not found' error)

Hope this helps..... for the record this happened to me after I copied the lenovo recovery partition on to the drive... the installation was done on an asus z68 desktop and, other than hard drives with lenovo recovery partitions on them, I have never encountered this error before so it might have something to do with that.....