Hi All,

I ran dban to clear my pc before selling it.

System is Dell Inspiron 530s 640GB hard drive (2x320GB drives)

I’m now attempting to re-install vista using the cd from dell but I am having difficulties.

I boot from CD so that the Vista installation process starts. I get as far as trying to select a drive (both say disk 0/1 unallocated space) to install on and I get the error message “windows is unable to find a system volume that meets the criteria for installation”. The info on the talks about making a drive active but I can’t find where to do that. Also, the people that seem to have this error message are booting from a seperate partition or have an external hard drive plugged in also that causes them the problem.

The only option I have in this menu is to create a new drive/parition in one of the disks and format it but this doesn’t aid me.

Has anyone encountered this before and able to explain to me how i solve this?

Ta

Not really ever installed vista much, but I know we used to get issue with XP and no drive listing due to the drive controller driver missing from the Xp install disc. When you start the load you usually get an option to install ‘extra’ drivers, get the driver from Dell. load it onto a disc or USB drive and install it at this point..

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&ServiceTag=&SystemID=INSP_DSKTP_D530S&os=WLH&osl=en&catid=&impid=

Though I believe there may also be an option to disable something in the BIOS, to make it install without doing this too.. it’s sunday and I need to walk the dog, so some-one else can find what that it…

thanks forthe quick reply! had a look at the drivers and didn;t see anything standing out as the driver controller.

I unpluggged the memory card reader as I saw this as a recommendation somewhere.

Actually, doing this seems to have worked, its running now!!!!!!