Windows 7 / Getting Started

Removing Disk Partitions During Installation

During installation, you may be unable to select the hard disk you want to use. This issue can occur if the hard disk partition contains an invalid byte offset value. To resolve this issue, you'll need to remove the partitions on the hard disk (which destroys all associated data) and then create the necessary partition using the advanced options in the Setup program. During installation on the "Where do you want to install Windows?", you can remove unrecognized hard disk partitions by following these steps:

  1. Press Shift-F10 to start a command prompt.
  2. At the command prompt, type diskpart.
  3. To view a list of disks on the computer, type list disk.
  4. Select a disk by typing select disk DiskNumber where DiskNumber is the number of the disk you want to work with.
  5. To permanently remove the partitions on the selected disk, type clean.
  6. When the cleaning process finishes, type exit to exit the DiskPart tool.
  7. Type exit to exit the command prompt.
  8. Restart the computer, and then start the Windows 7 installation.
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