Hi this is my first time trying an Microsoft Beta. I am trying to install onto a Maxtor Fireball 3 ATA/133 HDD 40GB hard drive. It used to have Linux on it until I formatted it to Fat 32 to ensure Windows compatibility. When I got to the partitioner I reformated it to NTFS. When it was done an error said that I could not continue because my hard drive MAY die soon. This is a perfectly good hard drive that has almost no wear on it. I am using the 32-bit install. Currently I am going to try it in VirtualBox. Also before I find out myself, can you install firefox in it?

Um... Any help please. Although this makes me sound like a total n00b but can someone help me quickly I kinda want to try this on bare hardware. Firefox works and I need help figuring out how to use "peek".

Anyone, help, please?

I have an idea.... I have already installed windows 7 in virtualbox to prove it could be installed there. so if i were able to create a virtual disk the same exact size as one of my physical hard drives the i could attach a virtual hard drive a little bit bigger that the first. After that run a linux live cd in the virtual machine and use dd to mak a byte-to-byte copy of the windows 7 hard drive. After that link my physical computer (running winXP) to the virtual machine (still on the live cd) and copy over the dd'd image of the hard drive to the physical computer. Then transfer the image to another hard drive then reboot with the other hard drive and the one i want to install windows to. Boot into a linux live cd on the physical computer and dd the image to the hard drive i want to use. It should work because a VM virtually emulkates your physical hardware. Could anyone tell that this will work at least in theory?

I don't know about your idea and I doubt it will work,but if you really wanted to you could give it a shot. I don't know why you would want to format your hardrive to fat32. Did you try reformatting your hard drive again, if so did you get the same message again? What operating system are you unning now? You can't use aero peek because you have to have aero enabled and in virtualbox aero does not support the emulated video card that virtualbox creates.

Were are you formatting the hard drive from? If you are formatting during installation then I suggest, instead of using the Windows 7 DVD to format, you try formatting the drive via Windows Vista. If you are formatting from Vista, or another operating system, try formatting from the Windows 7 setup.You might lso like to visit the Hard Drive manuafacturers' website. All hard drive manufacturers have diagnostic tools that you can download. For example Seagate have 'SeaTools' Download the diagnostics and run it to check the state of the drive. If the drive is okay when you run hard drive diagnostics your problem may actually be a bug in Windows 7.John Barnett - Windows XP Associate Expert; Windows Desktop Experience. - Web: http://www.winuser.co.uk; Web: http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org; Web: http://vistasupport.mvps.org