install problems

see the thing that leads me to believe that my windows disk is OK is that before i found these forums, i actually had win7 installed and ran into a problem with installing video drivers, windows update, etc... couldn't get it running smoothly so i tried to reinstall and haven't been able to get it back up and running

whats semi humorous in this situation is that the first time i installed it i had all 8 gigs of ram in the machine (windows saw it all too) and the optical drive was also in the marvell sata 6g/s controller along with the HD

i really want to do it correctly and get it working flawlessly, so now im doing alot more reading and learning before i just go plugging away like i know what im doing.

Makes memory and/or HD even more likely suspects.

I don't suspect the DVD although I would certainly clean off any smudges. We solved one marathon install issue once by a newbie dropping in after a week to tell OP (to much snickering) to copy his DVD and it worked. So anything is possible.

The OD could be failing, or the controller which might have some issues fixed in BIOS update. Installing from flash removes these as suspects.

You now have the 3 top methods for writing the stick: manual bootsecting, UltraISO trial and Win2flash. I'd try the latter two first.

reading up on tutorials, and showering.. ill check back

thanks guys

ok i have the memtest ready to boot and run overnight tonight, should i run it with all 4 sticks of ram?

I'd run it with all sticks and then if there are errors you may need to re-run it to test individual sticks to find the bad one.

There are

Known problems
There are two versions (or "streams") of Memtest86. One is simply known as Memtest86 (current version 3.5) and the other is known as Memtest86+ (current version 4.10). They both have almost identical screen appearance. The 3.5 version is known to fail on some (or many, or most) computers with 4 GB of installed memory (the failure results in a spontaneous system reboot soon after the program starts running). The Memtest86+ 4.0 version does not exhibit this behavior. Also, there is a single-core and multi-core version of the Memtest86 3.5 version, and the multi-core version has been observed to not function on systems using AMD or Intel Quad-core CPUs.

Source: Memtest86 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

thanks for the tip, i have the 4.10 version... ill let you know the results in the morning

night

got errors almost instantly.. going to try one stick in slot A1


edit: errors again, trying another sitck

A-ha! Looks like you hit pay dirt.

Just remember, any time Memtest reports errors, it can be either bad RAM or a bad motherboard slot. Test the sticks individually, and if you find a good one, test it in all slots.

More: https://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-d...tml#post953322

and http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1248356