No partition Available Error when installing new HD on Acer Extensa 4420?

Question

I bought a new HD for my Acer laptop and put it in, It goes thru it's normal bit like "windows is loading files..." and then I get a "no partition available" error. There is no way to partition a HD unless you can get into your OS...Am I right??

Answer 1

You need to check a few things, first is your new drive a SATA drive? if so you need to load the SATA drivers right at the beginning of the Windows install. A few seconds into the new install you should see along the bottom an option to press F6 to load the drivers, these need to be loaded from a floppy disk so a USB FD is required if there is no built in drive, this has to be connected before running the install procedure. The drivers are usually on the install CD and need to be extracted to a Floppy Disc, or from the laptop manufacturers website.

You also should check the BIOS to ensure that the drive is listed as the right one, and booting in the right order.

Even if you partition first on another PC you will still need to load the SATA drivers to be able to install the new OS.

Answer 2

This is a second HD? You can partition it using windows CD. Or you can wait windows load and then format the drive threw windows.



If it's second HD, then normally you get this error cause the HD not even formatted and Windows can't recognize it. So let windows load and then use disk manager threw windows (Go to start /run and type "compmgmt.msc") without "' . This will open computer manager, click on disk manager on left find the new disk and format it.



If is just one hard disk, you must use windows CD to boot up from CD and while you're on setup process you will have the option to format and partition hard disk.



Good luck

Answer 3

You can partition your hard drive with windows setup. But assuming you kept your old hard drive in, you should not be getting any errors when windows loads on the old drive.



In your bios try changing the "boot order" that will probably help. You may also have to flip some jumpers on the drive to put it in "slave" mode.