Major problems formatting/partitioning Intel SSD for Windows 7 install

I’m going a little crazy right now and hoping that someone can help me out.

I just purchased a new Lenovo x200 laptop and an Intel 160GB X-25M SSD. I put the new hard drive in the laptop and booted from the Windows 7 DVD that I burned. Everything is fine until I get to the “Where do you want to install Windows?” screen which lists the drives and partitions available. I have gone through this screen under several scenarios (don’t ask me how I’ve gotten these scenarios), and have not been able to get a successful install on any of them. The scenario I’m in right now is that there are no drives or partitions listed on which I can install Windows 7. There is a “Load Driver” option so I downloaded the firmware update tool for the drive (this is the only download available for the drive on Intel’s site) and attempted to load the driver to no avail. The second scenario I can get to is by doing a full un-provision on the drive. Once I do this, there are three items listed on the “Where do you want to install Windows?” screen: 100MB Unallocated, 100MB Partition 0 (System), and 149GB Partition 1 (Primary). I’ve tried two things under this scenario. First, I’ve tried formatting the Primary partition. When attempting to do so, I get an error saying that the partition cannot be formatted. The second thing I’ve tried is just selecting that drive to do the install on. I do this and get to the next step where it appears Windows 7 is being installed, and then moments later I get an error saying that Windows 7 was unable to create a partition on the drive.

Pleeeeease help. It’s driving me crazy and I’ve run out of ideas.

Just tried that.

Windows could not format a partition on disk 0. The error occured while preparing the partition selected for installation. Error code: 0x80070057.

If I try and click the format link before going to the next step, I get:

Failed to format the selected partition. [Error: 0x80070057].

Then the drive and all partitions completely disappear from the list and I have to do a full un-provision to get it back. I've done this several times now.

Hello,

Would be interested to discuss with an SSD Expert here.
What do you think about a MBR / GPT issue?

When Windows Seven creates and formats a partition, is it he fully compliant with GPT standard?

Now we are in a new era where we should move to EFI and maybe SSDs require newer firmwares or maybe Windows 7 needs a dedicated driver for SSD support (I'm not talking about TRIM command support here)

Best Regards

This happens when you ghost vista even... I've used this trick for Vista and Win7 images but I don't know if it can be done AFTER you reimage...

if you want to make a bootable Win7 image you need to run this command before making it:

bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot

after that you can create a good image that will not need repair after EVERY reboot.