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Win7 32 bit won't get past "Starting Windows"
The title pretty much says it all with respect to what's happening right now. When I first started trying to install Win 7, I got a blue screen telling me to disable caching of memory in a few different devices, so I went into CMOS setup and disabled anything I could find related to memory cache. Well, this did away with the blue screen, but then I got another screen offering to check the system memory, which I did. Afterward, it came up to the Starting Windows screen, where the four blobs swirl around and then form the Windows logo -- and from that point nothing more occurred. Rebooted and this time there was no screen offering to check memory again. It just went straight to the logo and stopped. Most recently, I went back and re-enabled all the cache settings that I'd disabled. No more blue screen, but the machine continues to stop at the same point.
Now a bit about the machine. It gets kinda complicated and I'll try to be clear. During the open test period last year, I installed the x86 7100 build on the machine and everything went fine, except for finding drivers for a couple of old peripherals (a SCSI controller and an old sound card). My entire reason for installing it was to see if Win 7 lived up to MS's claims that it would run well on older hardware. That motherboard and processor was 2001 vintage and was running 768mb of RAM. It was perfectly adequate for years as an XP platform, and I wanted to see how it handled Win 7. As it turned out, it did fine.
During the interim between then and now, my daughter upgraded her machine and her more recent mobo and processor became available -- 2005 vintage. So, I decided to swap out the mobos and processors, but left the hard drives in place. Now, I know from past experiences that Windows becomes very sensitive to the hardware it's installed on and I knew this would be a problem for Win 7, so rather than even trying to deal with that mess, I just formatted the C drive and set it to "bootable." I used the Linux utility Parted Magic to do the formatting and to set the boot flag. The C drive is 30 gigs, so it's big enough for x86 Win 7 and then some.
For reference, the old mobo is an MSI model K7T Turbo and the newer one is an MSI K7N2 Delta. Both mobos are running AMD processors. I like MSI. I've had very good experiences with their products and will use them again provided that they have maintained the same reliability that they have shown in the past.
So, to my way of looking at things, I have a fresh system to install Win 7 on (empty C drive and all), and I've got my XP disk handy to verify that I qualify for the Win 7 upgrade. But it doesn't appear that I can even get to the point where it starts setting things up for Win 7. First time I've run into this. I'm not a Windows techno-weenie by any means, but this is my fourth time installing Win 7 (one 64-bit and three 32-bit), so I've been through this before, but I've never been stopped out this early before.
Any ideas what I should be looking for that might be causing this?