My wish to experiment with a bare metal installation of Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 on my HP DL360 G7 was met with a very inconvenient error “We couldn’t create a new partition or locate an existing one. For more information, see the setup log files.”.
I reviewed the setup log called setupact.log stored in C:\Windows\panther, and there was no clear reason. I just kept being greeted with the same error.
My initial troubleshooting was to check the boot order in the BIOS, RAID controller boot disk settings, disk partition type, did Shift+F10 to open CMD to clean the disk with diskpart, updated the RAID controller firmware, loaded the RAID controller driver through the “Load driver” option during the setup, but, nothing seemed to help.
The next day I had the idea of removing all the disk drives and only leave one, but it also didn’t work. I thought about going a step further, and remove the SD card from the internal slot I had used to boot VMWare ESXi from.
That was the solution for the Windows Server installation error. Upon further experimentation I also realized that loading the correct RAID controller driver, and setting the main HDD as the boot drive in the BIOS is also very important.
