Windows 7: Installation Problem - Stuck on Username/Password Screen

Hello,



I am stuck on the Username/Password screen that has appeared during the installation of Windows 7 Home Premium. This is an install over an existing version of windows, but is not an upgrade of that version.

I enter a Username and Password and I get the error message:

"The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted."

If I leave it blank it requests a username and password.

I have no access to any functionality of windows. I have tried the previous version of windows Username and Password.

I also searched the forum and found nothing relating to this problem.

Ok after more searching I found a thread relating to this that recommended running clean all on my HDD.

Not really the best option to wipe 300gig of information from a drive which is partitioned, and the process described here didn't seem to give any other option but wiping the whole drive.

Instead I have opted to format C:, which would leave all my information available still on D: and E: partitions.

Is there any reason this will not work?

Hi James

It would be best to put d and e's information onto another harddrive if you could. You could wipe the partition c and not format it, but don't wipe the mbr or your screwed. There are many programs that you can use to wipe a partition I use Acronis Disk Director suite on Hirens boot cd. Just simply right click on the partition and select how many passes you want and leave it unformated. Then when install Windows 7 just select that partition to installed to and it will do the rest...

I used the directions in the link given to get to diskpart.

At this stage I typed in:

c:

format c:

This formatted the C drive, I then did

exit

exit

And this took me out. I then continued with the Windows 7 installation process. It appears to have worked. I am now on the desktop of Windows 7. I have not really used it yet, but hopefully this will work. I will return and post if there are continued problems.

Otherwise it might be a better option for those not wanting to lose all of the information on separate partitions.

Other then struggling to get on the network, it seems fine, still have all the data on the other partitions.

Might be best to recommend this at first, rather then recommended an entire wipe of a large drive....can always do that after if this doesn't fix the problems.

Hello James23, welcome to Seven Forums!



Good to see you have it running; for future reference, have a look at Option Three of this tutorial at the link below for an out-line of how to do a partition specific wipe "secure erase" on a Hard Disk Drive, this will safely do a single partition.

Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD


Of course this is the one that will do the entire HDD and leave it as unallocated space.

SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation

   Note

Contrary to popular belief, formatting does not remove any data at all, it just checks for sector errors and marks the space to be over-written as needed, all the data is still there including all the code from previous/failed installation attempts.