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#1
Windows 7 x64 Installation Loop on New Computer
I have Windows 7 x64 Enterprise installed on a slightly older mother board (Asus MB 775 Intel with 2 GB of RAM) and has worked well for a couple of years or so. I am passing this MB/CPU/RAM combo to my son's computer and have purchased an upgraded MB/CPU/RAM.
I've purchased an ASRock H61/U3S3 MB, 2x2GB RAM, Intel i7 2600. In swapping out the MB, I just attempted to plug my hard drive into this MB without doing any installation/upgrade. Unfortunately, when I plugged in the hard drive and turned it on, the computer froze on startup and more specifically, on loading the file CLASSPNP.SYS.
So I figured I would have to do a fresh install of Windows. I have an identical hard drive for mirroring and deleted the partition, created new one, formatted, then attempted the reinstall. I began the installation, it copied over all of the files, installed, restarted, then when it was starting it restarted (apparently prematurely). When it restarts after locking up, I receive the error:
"The computer restarted unexpectedly or encounter an expected error. Windows installation cannot proceed. To install Windows, click 'OK' to restart the computer, and then restart the installation." and so the loop goes on.
I've clicked OK many times, but without restarting the installation this error comes up each time. During the final stages of completing the installation of Windows, the computer appears to randomly restart. I'm pretty much stuck and will contact the store that sold me the MB as a last resort.
Any help with this installation process would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your assistance.
Things I have tried:
Unplugging the NIC card so upgrades don't happen.
Removing each stick of RAM individually.