# Hard drive formating help

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/hard-drive-formating-help/164300>\
**Category:** open source\
**Created:** [September 29, 2005, 11:55pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/hard-drive-formating-help/164300 "2005-09-29T23:55:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![3d\_Nirvana](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/3/a88e4f/32.png) [@3d\_Nirvana](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/3d_Nirvana)\
**Post date:** [September 29, 2005, 11:55pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/hard-drive-formating-help/164300/1 "2005-09-29T23:55:04Z")

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I got a copy of windows vista from a family friend, and I’m having g a lot of troubles installing. First of all I tried to install to a external USB hard drive, but realized that my mother board didn’t support USB booting after a day of frustration.

So i back up my second hard drive (internal) and reformat/partition it. I stick the dvd in and the install thing comes up, the install goes perfectly till it’s just about done, then it says “error cant find blahblah.dll , reinstalling might fix this problem”.

So I reformat that partition again, and go to install, now windows vista cant see my 2nd drive. The bios can see the drive, and when I run the setup from xp it can see the drive (if I try to install from xp it restarts after half the install and says the drive cannot be accessed). When I go to boot off the vista DVD to install it doesn’t see my second hard drive at all.

Do I have to format the drive specially to be able to boot from it? Someone help me!

Drive stats:  
Western Digital 200gb 7200rpm

Thanks in advance,  
3dnirvana