Windows 7 – Page 2 – TommyNation.com

How to Resolve the “Setup was unable to create a new system partition” Issue During Windows 7 Setup

By Tommy Stephansen
26th August, 2012

Just the other day, I stumbled upon a couple of challenges when trying to install Windows 7 on a RAID array of two SSDs on my computer.

1st Issue: The missing RAID drivers

Since they didn’t exist when Windows 7 SP1 was put together, I had to load them manually inside of Windows 7 Setup.

This was simple enough, though:

I got on my laptop and downloaded the Intel RAID drivers from the ASUS support page for my Sabertooth X79 motherboard, then extracted the files to a USB drive.
I unplugged the USB disk from my laptop and loaded the driver from within Windows 7 Setup by connecting the USB drive to my main computer while in the “Where do you want to install Windows?” screen. I clicked “Load Driver” and browsed to the “Driver\Disk\64bit” folder. The next screen let me choose which driver to install (only gave me one choice).
The driver loaded in a couple of minutes and the disk showed up, just like a good student to school.

2nd Issue: “Setup was unable to create a new system partition”

This issue was a little trickier. To my disappointment, Windows 7 wouldn’t let me install on the RAID disk array I had chosen, giving the following error message:

“Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. See the Setup log files for more information”. Continue reading

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How To Determine Windows Edition

By Tommy Stephansen
4th March, 2012

Sometimes you might want to check for which Windows “edition” is installed on a computer. Let’s say you’ve made an app that you want to be free for personal use, but want to force enterprises to pay a licensing fee if they want to use it in their environment.

A quick and dirty registry key check performed in the startup sequence of your application can be enough to find whether the Windows “edition” installed is Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate or Enterprise. Continue reading

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Efficient File Copying With Microsoft Richcopy

By Tommy Stephansen
24th May, 2011

Download Richcopy Now

Many are already familiar with the Robocopy command line utility from Microsoft, bundled with all recent versions of Windows. Robocopy basically provides a good level of granular control over folder copy operations. Since Windows 7 and Server 2008, Robocopy even supports multithreaded copying.

Robocopy has its limitations, however, and I would most times prefer to use a tool with a user interface. This has actually existed since 2006, when Microsoft engineer Derk Benisch created “Robocopy GUI”, but there is an even better alternative around these days…

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SSD Not Available During Windows 7 Setup

By Tommy Stephansen
22nd May, 2011

Intel X25-V SSD - Still Not Getting The Daily TRIM

Intel X25 SSD: Sometimes not showing up to the party

There’s a lot of people who have had issues with their SSD not showing up in the list of available hard drives when installing Windows 7, and today I got to be one of them. I wanted to do a fresh install of Windows 7 on an Intel X25-V SSD (40GB), but the disk just wouldn’t show up.

This particular disk was used as a swap disk in a different system, so I figured it might have some problems related to formatting. Changing from IDE mode to ACHI mode did not do anything. (For Intel SSDs, IDE mode is required for the Intel software to work).

After looking around for a solution on the interwebs, I found two possible solutions, listed by “ease of use”. The second one worked for me, as I happened to have a bootable USB with GParted on hand, but the first one should work too.

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LG Home Link CIFS Problems and Solutions

By Tommy Stephansen
22nd March, 2011

Life's No Good with Windows Live

LG units with network features enable streaming of videos and audio from your home computer via a feature known as Home Link. A lot of people have been having problems with the CIFS login, used to access Windows computers (myself included).

The problem I was having, was that even though I shared out my folders with “Read” access for “Everyone”, I still got prompted for a CIFS username and password. So, I first tried to create a new user with a password on my Windows 7 computer, but to no avail.

LG support could not solve the problem (maybe not talking with their engineers much?), but after a little Googling the cause and solution to the problem surfaced:

My computer had installed the “Windows Live Sign-in Assistant” via Windows Update.

After uninstalling it via “Programs and Features” and rebooting my computer, the problem was solved!

Other Windows Live-related services seem to cause similar problems. If you have recently installed anything Windows Live-related, such as Live Mesh, try uninstalling some of these as well if the problem persists.

Also, remember to enable file sharing in Windows and share out your folder(s) to the user “Everyone” to be able to browse your computer shares via any LG network enabled players. Alternatively, create a user with a password to limit access if you’re on a shared network. As long as you don’t install the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant, you should be good to go.

Note: The Windows Media Player sharing service is still accessible via Home Link even with Windows Live Sign-in Assistant installed, however in order to watch movies in certain formats or containers, such as MKV, it may be necessary to be able to browse the shared folders on your computer to even see these files and their parent folders, depending on what software version your Home Link enabled device is running.

Note (2): Can’t see the shared folders under the Home Link Select a Server view? Log in to your server, presumably running Windows, and go to Start and search for “services.msc”. Right-click it and select “Run as administrator”. Locate the service named “Server”, right-click it and select “Restart”. If you get prompted about depending services, just select OK. Wait until the services are all restarted and the status pop-up closes itself, then try refreshing the “Select a Server” view (press the green button).

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Multithreaded File Copies with Robocopy in Windows 7

By Tommy Stephansen
11th August, 2010

Robocopy is included in Windows 7 and features a new multi-threaded copy option. To perform a multi-threaded copy, you use the new /MT[:n] switch, where n indicates the number of threads to be used. By default, n is 8 when you use the /MT option, and can be any value from 1 to 128.
Note that the multi-threaded option is not compatible with the /IPG and /EFSRAW options.

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Category: Windows 7