Hi all. I have a new 160 WD Gig HD which I have partitioned intop 2 equal parts using "On Track Manager", (same as the WD Data Life Guard with a few more whistle and bells). The Partitioned are formatted to NTFS. As I remember, the first partition is labelled "Primary" and the other is "logical". I insert the new HD into the removable cassette receiver on my PC (I can interchange drives/operating systems when the PC is turned of). So in effect I now have a PC with no operating systems but a hard drive partitioned into 2 (vanilla) partitions. I insert the Vivta installation disc and the system boots up and goes through load untill a few minutes in when a panel appears displaying the 2 drives. The top one is hi-lighted. Now the problem! The loading stalls here and an error message is displayed to the effect: "Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets it's criteria for insatallation". I have searched the net and found that this is a very common occurance (good on you Microsoft you remain true to fashion), and that a lot of the time it turns out that the problem was that neither of the vanilla partitions was an "active partition". However, no where can I find as to how I can confirm the active partition, or more to the point, how can I make one of the partitions "active"? . All help appreciated. PS: Has anyone used the forum Vista4beginners? If so, where the blazers is the submit post button? Regards Thinking hurts my head that's why I live in West Australia

Delete the partitions and install the blank HDD. Then start your PC with the Windows install disk in the DVD-ROM drive. Your PC must have the first boot device set to DVD-ROM drive. You can do the partitioning and formatting during Vista install. Regards SuatCINI

or take the disk to another vista system and install as a slave..then right click my computer, select manage, then select disk management, then highlight the partition/disk you want to set active, then select more task(right of screen) select all task, select mark partition active...take disk back to your system and try your install again... Good Luck

Diskpart.exe can be used in the vista recovery command prompt. http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/... Dunno why it has to be active??? Are you doing a clean install or an upgrade? "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

Hi there. Yes it was a clean install but it is now fixed. I used the XP system as it was the easies to access. Thanks for the help. Regards Thinking hurts my head that's why I live in West Australia