Sat Feb 08, 2014 6:35 pm
Oof. Reinstalling windows is not fun.
Installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 on new SSD (Crucial M500 240 GB) this morning.
Made a USB install disk, installed new drive, rebooted.
Windows installer refused to install to new SSD, quoting error 'Windows is unable to install to the selected location. Error:0x80300024'
So I thought "Maybe it's because my drive is unpartitioned?" Rebooted into old install, partitioned and formatted SSD with 4K sector size. Still no good.
A little googling said the error could be due to conflicting system boot drives in the PC, so I unplugged the old SSD boot drive and retried. Still no good.
After systematically unplugging every other drive in my POC, it turned out that my USB HDD dock that I keep data files on was the culprit.
OK windows finally installed. Everything good, right? NEWP. Windows install disk didn't have drivers for my ethernet connection!
So, reboot into old windows install, find and download realtek ethernet drivers (Ew, I know).
Re-reboot into new windows installation, install drivers.
OK. Phew. Time for Office. Nothing can go wrong, right?
Except office install kept failing on me. Looking up another machine error code, turns out it didn't like that .Net was out of date.
So, update .Net.
Finally, Got a working windows 7 installation and working Office. Can't wait to see what will go wrong next...
Wind, Sand and Stars.