Windows – “No drives were found” during windows 7 Installation

Ubuntuwindowswindows 7windows 8windows-installation

I have XPS-15 L502 with 1TB HD

I have ONLY ubuntu 12.04 installed. It runs just fine. No other OS is installed.

While trying to re-install Windows 7 using the Recovery Disk Dell provides, it asks me "Where do you want to install Windows".

But no drives are visible. It says "No drives were found. Click Load Driver to provide a mass storage driver for installation".

I want to COMPLETELY erase EVERYTHING on my HD and install windows 7 or 8. (I have both Installation disks).
Here's the screenshot of the error.

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Best Answer

After you get past the language selection, select Repair, open Command Prompt and type the following commands (pressing Enter after each one):

 diskpart

 list disk

 select disk [n]

 clean

Restart the system, and now you should be able to complete the installation.

Explanation about the commands

list disk: Displays a list of disks and information about them, such as their size, amount of available free space, whether the disk is a basic or dynamic disk, and whether the disk uses the master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT) partition style. The disk marked with an asterisk (*) has focus.

select disk [n]: Selects the specified disk and shifts the focus to it. n Specifies the disk number of the disk to receive focus. If you do not specify a disk number, the select command lists the disk that currently has the focus. You can view the numbers for all disks on the computer by using the list disk command.

clean: Removes any and all partition or volume formatting from the disk with focus. On master boot record (MBR) disks, only the MBR partitioning information and hidden sector information are overwritten. On GUID partition table (GPT) disks, the GPT partitioning information, including the Protective MBR, is overwritten; there is no hidden sector information.

Related Solutions

Windows 7 Install: No drives were found

Note that running these commands will break any previous OS and data on disk.

After you get past the language selection, select Repair, open Command Prompt and type the following commands (pressing Enter after each one):

diskpart

list disk

select disk <number>

clean

Restart the system, and now you should be able to complete the installation.

Windows – Dual boot Windows 8 and Windows 7, why can’t Windows 8 installation see the drives

The solution to this problem was tracked through comments to the question itself but in case somebody stumbles upon something similar this would be the way of fixing it.

The problem with the setup program not being able to see drives or partitions may be related to it not having access to a suitable AHCI or RAID driver. Windows 8 supports some configurations but some others require a driver.

Access a Windows 7 (or Vista, or XP) system running in the machine you wish to install, through the device manager find the SATA controler (AHCI or RAID may be in its name too). For example in this particular case it was "Intel(R) Desktop/Workstation/Server Express Chipset SATA RAID Controller".
Download the drivers for your SATA or RAID controller, there'll need to be an INF file and some catalog and system files along. Copy them to a USB stick and reboot the computer booting into Windows 8 installation.
When you reach the stage where you have to select where you'd like to install it plug in the USB stick (preferably in a USB 2.0 port, but I believe Windows 8 has native support for USB 3.0 too) and load the driver from the folder containing it.
After that Windows should be able to access the drives and partitions and the installation should proceed as usual.

When the driver to access the storage system is not present by default in the installation DVD, installing from the Windows already running in the system is not recommended and may fail. The reason is that while that windows does have access to the drive, the new one wont and after rebooting it may lead to infinite reboot cycles.