We couldn’t create a new partition or locate an existing one. For more information, see the Setup log files.

I got this message when I was trying to install Windows Server 2012 R2 on a brand new DELL T430 server, so I thought, why not share how I fixed this! I have to mention that ESXi 5.x was running on this box before I tried installing Windows on it. I encountered this before, so it’s not new for me and usually I got this when the partition had some sort for Unix/Linux file system.

In my previous situations I will just hit Shift+F10 to launch the command prompt and use diskpart to clean the disk and create a new partition manually:

After this, the installation just worked, but not in this case; so I launched the command prompt again to read the setup log file. This is located in the temp drive\Windows\panther. Inside this directory is the setupact.log file which stores everything about the installation setup, but if you try to open it you will get an access denied message.

To be able to read the log file, make a copy of it,

and open the copy. When I saw what the problem was I could not believe it; because the disk I was trying to install the OS is not the computer’s boot disk, the wizard can’t create a partition and start the install. And to be honest, the computer’s boot disk at that moment was an SD card, because ESXi was booting from an SD card.

I rebooted the server, entered the BIOS and modified the boot order so the RAID controller to be the first boot device, and not the SD card.

And what do you know ! It worked.

I know this is not a general solving solution, because every infrastructure out there is different.  Make sure to check every configuration of the server, because as you just saw, smaller settings are the ones causing the big problems.