Okay! I have found the solution (in this case)! After hours of frustration, etc, etc.
So, I had ruled out the DVD since it worked fine on another computer.
I took all the steps as recommended by the troubleshooting threads such as remove extra ram, disconnect and disable ANYTHING unnecessary (though, in my case that turned out to be not needed) and still had this stall issue.
I found after trials and tribulations that if I ejected the DVD after a certain amount of time (a couple minutes) that the first window would come up.
*As someone suggested above, this sort of indicated that there might be something wrong with the optical drive in some way,
drivers or what have you.
So I got to the "Install" screen, hit that, and after a few minutes of "Starting setup" screen ejected the DVD again and it gave me a screen that said necessary CD
drivers not present (common message) yadda yadda. Well this is odd, my DVD drive uses the most basic of atapi
drivers, which the windows setup of course has. SO, I decided to get a USB drive ready to startup off that in case I needed to disconnect the DVD drive, which was causing the stalls.
On my laptop, I get the USB drive formatted and files copied, but I can't load the bootloader because I'm trying to install 64bit on my desktop, and the laptop has 32bit vista. What a pain, I'm pretty frustrated at this point. On a whim, I try it anyway. No luck booting off the USB stick (*on a side note, with this gigabyte motherboard you have to select USBHDD instead of USBFDD to start off a USB flash disk drive).
So I throw the DVD in there again and it starts up, and I take it out at the specified time. Now, since the USB drive is still plugged in, and the DVD is out, even though it loaded the setup system off the DVD drive it's detecting drivers and copying files from the USB drive! Awesome! Success! Windows 7 loads smoothly and detects everything. SOLUTION! (I think)
Ok, so the above solution that I hobbled together worked to get windows 7 on the computer. It worked great, I thought I had solved the problem. However, when I went to load my first programs off a CD, the disk wouldn't read and just spun up (much like when I had system installation problems). Hmmmm, I thought to myself. WTF could be happening?
Well, I was looking around doing some google searches on my Samsung DVD drive model number and came across a post from GorfTheFrog on Toms Hardware that I must have missed the first time around (
Vista64 Install Won't Recognize Samsung SH-S222 - DVD-CD-Writers - Storage ) and he had success just changing his IDE CABLE FROM A GENERIC TO THE ONE THAT CAME WITH THE MOTHERBOARD. I've had extensive experience with EE and CE back in college and this defied common sense as well but I was out of options so I gave it a try.
This. Fixed. Everything. Hours of frustration and a trip to best buy to pick up a 4gb flash drive for nothing (well, we can't say that, if it wasn't difficult it wouldn't be the same sense of accomplishment, right? I'm rationalizing here, back away from the cliff, self). So in the end, even though the dvd drive worked fine in my other system with that ide cable, switching ide cables fixed everything.
I hope my story can save someone else some time. In summary my suggestions are:
TL;DR:
1. When installing a new motherboard, use cables the motherboard came with if at all possible, pack away any old cables rather than re-use them unless you need them down the road.
2. If you can't get you DVD disk to work right, and you can't get a USB drive to boot, try booting from the DVD disk and pulling it out once windows starts. Leave the USB drive plugged in and the windows setup should copy everything fine from the USB drive (assuming your BIOS and Win setup recognize the USB drive).
If anyone has any questions, let me know.