I'm reinstalling Windows 7 64 bit, and I encountered an issue I've never seen before. I have a legit copy of Win 64 Professional, and I've installed it probably a half dozen times on this machine in the past without a problem.

Googling the error only brings me to issues with people who are upgrading to win7.

The drive itself seems to not have a problem. I can mount it on other systems and I can create an NTFS partition on it on other machines. I can install Ubuntu on it without any issues. Additionally, if I try using my alternate backup hard drive, the installer gives the same error.

I have run diskpart from the setup page and clean seems to report that all is well. However, I cannot get past the screen below, which says Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. This happens regardless of whether or not the disk space is already allocated.

What is causing this? How do I solve or get past this?