Help understanding this please

[2az87]

I have a Compaq Presario 900 laptop that I got a new 160GB hard drive for and haven't had any success installing Win 7 onto it.  I found this   "Your notebook PC was not designed to operate with the Windows Vista operating system."  Ok I know that XP and Vista/7  are designed differently.  So can someone please help me understand how/why I'm able to post this  question while 7 is currently installed on this laptop on the 40GB hard drive that I wished to replace. I have been using 7 for the last 3+ months flawlessly til this new HD. Install disk is not the problem.

THANX IN ADVANCE FOR ANY AND ALL HELP TJ.

[RoyalSerpent]

Zero fill the hard drive using Copywipe or equivalent and retry.  You may need to use a 3rd party partitioning tool like PartitionMagic to create one Primary Active NTFS partition before you attempt to install W7.

[2az87]

It sees 149GB of the 160GB so I created a 40GB partition/format.  When I installed XP on the hard drive to make sure that it wasn't a bad XP would only see 128GB. If I remember correctly doesn't XP have an issue or limit size for larger drives.

[2az87]

I did use Darik's Boot and Nuke to completely wipe it from the other attempts and still froze after 3+ hrs into the install, with the 40gn hard drive 7 installs a 100% fresh install in 40-45 minutes.