Fatal error 0x80004005 at installation

[Hilarious]

While trying to reinstall Vista I repeatedly get the error message
"Windows could not assign a drive letter to a partition on disk 0.
The error occurred while preparing the partition selected for
installation. Error code 0x80004005"

This was after an activation error message locked me out of the system
(my browser wouldn't run as well) so I decided to reinstall. During
the repeated install failures, all with this message, I ensured that
the partition was re-formatted before installation to stop gripes
about 'not enough space' and in case old stuff would prejudice the re-
installation. I even re-formatted it as DOS via a boot disk at the
end (it was happy to call it 'C:'). I tried having the Vista partition
made active but to no avail.

The disk is 6 months old and it has a number of partitions on it: a
DOS 'boot' partition (active), XP, Vista (this one) - all primaries
and 2 Data spaces and a Linux distro or two in the extended. The
whole show was being (happily) booted via GRUB for a few weeks prior
to this.

I was expecting (as it had before) to find Vista taking over the
booting of itself and XP and to sort out the Linux booting later.

Anyone seen this error in this context before?

Cheers,

 

[Richard Urban]

Reformatting a partition is not going to help if you have a corrupted MBR.
Deleting/creating/formatting a new partition will rebuild the MBR. Give it a
try.

What did the Linux support groups have to say. After all, you are mixing two
operating systems on the same disk. Give them a shot.

--

Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)