Installing Windows 7 with some Linux help

I've been working with Windows 7 for some months now, and while 7's not for netbooks, I vastly prefer Windows 7 to Vista. So, when it came time to try out the release candidate, I didn't expect to have any trouble. I was wrong.

For the Windows 7 RC (release candidate), I used my main Windows test desktop: a Gateway DX4710. This PC is powered by a 2.5-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor and has 6GBs of RAM and an Intel GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) 3100 for graphics. It's no speed demon, but it gets the job done.

In the past, I had updated this desktop to Windows 7. This time, I took Microsoft's word that the best thing to do was to install Windows 7 as a new operating system. That was a mistake. After zapping the Windows 7 beta on my PC, Windows 7 couldn't find a hard drive partition to install itself on.

OK, so I tell Windows 7 to format and then select the 'new' partition. I'd already saved off all my data to a network drive so I wasn't worried about losing any information. That didn't work either. The Windows 7 installer would report that it taken care of the drive, but then it still couldn't find an installable partition.

Weird.

Next, I did something I should have done at the start and remove the PC's pair of external USB drives. An operating system installation program shouldn't ever make mistakes about what drives it's using, but why give it a chance to foul things up? That didn't work either though.

So, having had enough of this, I went to a tool I knew would work: my favorite Linux system repair CD, SystemRescueCD 1.1.2. With this Gentoo-Linux based distribution, I used GParted (Gnome Partition Editor) to set up the partition yet again and format it with Windows' NTFS.

This time, when I booted up from the Windows 7 RC DVD, the installation routine immediately found the partition and installed Windows 7 on it. So, thanks to Linux, I'm now running Windows 7 on that system.

Even if you don't run into this particular problem, you'd be well advised to get a copy of SystemRescueCD. No matter what operating system you run on a daily basis, I've found that SystemRescueCD is a great repair-kit for those times when you run into serious PC problems.