Gah. I finally broke down and got windows vista, and I can' even get it installed!

First, sda1 was supposed to be unpartioned but it was somehow a linux partition. I cfdisk'd a fix and upartitioned it. I booted vista again and partioned it from within the vista dvd, but I still can choose to install there. It just says "windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation." You would think 95gb would be enough.

Anyway, I have no clue what to do. Am I stuck just wiping my disk clean? I really don't want to lose all of my stuff...

With all that stuff you got you didn't think to get two hard drives?

I didn't think I would need two. I read about a bunch of people who dual-boot on one. None of them seemed to report any trouble like I'm having.

well you could just get a small one to boot vista off of

I have a few extra hd's lying around, but the biggest is 6gb. I think Vista requires around 15 or something like that.

I'm guessing 10GB's is all error prone code? XD

I'd say temporarily replace the HDD and see if it boots. If it does, copy the error log - or something, - cancel and retry the first HDD and see what the differences.

Microsoft

After googleing some more I saw that some people got the same problem and fixed it by setting the harddrive as the primary boot device instead of the dvd drive. I already have an OS on my hd, though.

Does anyone else here have an ASUS P5W DH Deluxe? If so, do you know how to force the mobo to boot a cd instead of following the boot priority list?

I think I'll try flashing my BIOS tomorrow and seeing if that fixes anything...

You are selecting a "custom" vista install, correct?

Yep. I don't think I can select any others, actually.

You installed linux first I guess... I think you have to install Vista, then Linux. What you're going to have to do is use a CD to erase the partition, create a NTFS or FAT32 partition, then let Vista eat that up in the installer. Vista = St00pid.

Yup, the same was true with XP, because XP stupidly overwrites any previous bootloader.

Um, just because it overwrites the bootloader doesn't mean you HAVE to do it that way, does it? Can't you just reinstall grub via a live cd or the super grub disk?

And I updated my mobo BIOS. The install screen is now waaay more visually pleasing. It used to just be 3 shades of gray in what looked like spilled paint over the monitor. Now it has the fancy windows colors looking quite sech-say. But I still get the same stupid 'Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation.'

I suppose I'm just going to have to delete linux and try it on a clean drive. Is there any good way to back up everything or am I just going to have to start again from scratch when I reinstall linux?

Oh, and if my one friend comes home before too late, I might go over and install XP, then install vista as an upgrade. We'll see how that goes.

Backing up in linux is easy. ALL of your settings (and I mean ALL of them) are stored in your /home/<username> folder. The settings are all in hidden folders, but you can just copy your username folder and all of the hidden ones should be copied as well. Boom, done

You will lose installed programs, obviously, but that shouldn't be a big deal, as you can just backup the apt repository (wherever its located).

EDIT: Oh, and you are having the part you want vista installed to as UNPARTITIONED, right? You partition it and format it from within the Vista installer - I believe.

EDIT2: Wait, what do you mean sda1 was supposed to be unpartitioned? Unpartitioned volumes aren't recognize by linux, and therefore wouldn't show up as anything (meaning even if you left the first chunk of space free, the first partitioned space would be sda1, regardless of whether or not there is/was unallocated space before or after the partitions)

Okay, I didn't mean to, but somewhere along the line sda1 (the space I chose to leave as unpartitiioned during my ubuntu install became partitioned as a linux partition. I've deleted it and remade and formatted it from the vista dvd many times. (Oh, and just to note, it recognizes my linux partition as the wrong kind of partition.)

And many people I found on google searches said to make sure it is an 'active' partition. I didn't see an 'active' option in cfdisk or gparted. Is that the same as a 'boot flag'? I was going to set the ntfs partition windows made up with a boot flag, but doing that removed the boot flag from my linux partition and I was afraid to mess that up.

Leave it UNPARTITIONED and try selecting it then.

EDIT: Oh, and ignore whatever the hell vista is calling your linux drive (and now would be a really good time to back up, by the way )

You can try changing the boot flag - at worst all you will have to do is either re-install grub (sudo grub-install should do the trick), or use the Vista boot manager (I'm speculating its possible, as you could with the XP boot loader)

I've never had any problems with the following setup:
sda1: (NTFS) 100 GBWindows partition (partition it in the Windows installer); BOOT flag set
sda2: (NTFS) /media/Audio, 10 GB
sda3: (ext3) /boot, ~200 MB; BOOT flag set
sda4: extended partition
sda5: (ext3) / for Ubuntu, ~34 GB
sda6: swap, 1 GB
sda7: (xfs) / for Gentoo, ~34 GB

I've installed Vista 4 or 5 times and never had problems with partitioning, most of the times after installing some form of Linux.
I usually make GRUB chainload vista on sda1.

I've tried selecting the unpartitioned space many times. I still get the system volume criteria error.

It's reading my table's partitions correctly (or so it seems)

It says:
Disk 0 Unallocated Space - 97.7GB total - 97.7GB free
Disk 0 Partition 1 - 97.7GB total - 0.0MB free (I assume it says 0 free because it is reiserfs)
Disk 0 Partition 2 - 98.9 free - 98.9 free (this is fat32, i think. i have stuff on it though. It isn't actually all free)
Disk 0 Partition 3 - 3.9GB - 0.0MB free (makes sense. that's my swap)

Well, I got Vista installed...

First, I tried to install XP (a legal copy, of course ), so I could do an upgrade. I tried to install it to my first partition, and all seemed to go fine, but when I tried to boot, it just gave an error about a corrupted OS. I got mad, deleted EVERY partition and installed XP to that. It worked, but couldn't find my soundcard (it's integrated in the mobo). Then, I put in the vista cd while in XP and chose the clean install from there.

I have it installed to the entire hd, though. It is all one partition. I can add other partitions from the Ubuntu installer without messing up my windows install, right?

I do believe Ubuntu can resize partitions without loosing data.

I'm going to be taking the Vista plunge here myself in a few weeks - compusa near me is going out of sale, and I can pick up Vista Ultimate for like $150 (home premium is $95)

Yes, the ubuntu installer can resize NTFS partitions.