Title says it all really.  Vista shouldn’t be installed to Dynamic disks – in fact Vista Home Premium doesn’t even support Dynamic disks.

I got caught by this recently as I was trying to upgrade an XP MediaCenter machine which someone else has originally set up and the upgrade kept failing for no apparent reason in odd ways.

It would get stuck expanding files or completing installation. It was only when out of desperation I went to do a clean install I realised that the XP disk had been formatted as dynamic. 

 If I hadn’t already tried a clean install I could have converted the partition to normal in xp (google converting dynamic partitions). As I had tried a clean install I boooted the install disk and went to recovery mode and choise command prompt. I then used diskpart to clean the parttion…

DiskPart

List Disk

This showed my drive as disk 0

Select Disk 0

Clean

exit

Rebooted the install, selected my newly cleaned partition  and hey presto the install goes past the point of crashing – all is well.

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