W7 Ultimate repair install last phase: Setup cannot continue

Rincewindwiz · 22 Dec 2015

Windows 7 Ultimate installation not working properly.
Symptoms: Windows unstable; cant always get task manager to start; Windows explorer hangs; Safeboot with networking produces BSOD when when loading (CLASSPNP.SYS).

Checked the ususal stuff (CHKDSK; Scannow; virus, cleanboot etc) bit all come up clean so I tried a repair install.

All seemed to be going fine until I get to 'Transferring files and settings' and after transferring 222076 out of 1139722 (39%) I get the message
Setup cant continue. Computer will restart and previous version will be restored.
No error number

I interrupted the reboot process to do the built in system tests (disk, memory etc) and they all passed.
Tried to reboot into safe mode to see if installation had run out of HDD space (only 16GB free when it started) but it would not let me adn went back to restoring the original version of windows

I really don't want to clean boot 'cos its a lot of reinstalling to do.

So any suggestions as to what went wrong / how I can fix it?
Seems it had got through the hard bit and just fell over restoring stuff that was already there

Thanks for any helpful suggestions

Rincewindwiz · 24 Dec 2015

Well lack of disk space was the problem
MS says somewhere 16 GB is OK but it failed as above.
I tried again with 21GB and it failed again

Fortunately its a partitioned drive so I chucked some data off and resized the partitions (so it actually had around 70GB) and it completed no problem at all.

I tried with 21GB ad it failed again (44% through last phase)
I tried with 70GB and it worked.

In the unlikely event that it is a linear progression, my minimum would seem to be around 36GB (5GB does 22% so 15GB does 66% + 21GB did 44%) which is way different from the MS figure of 16GB!

Only two programs (so far) have indicated a problem (Minolta printer monitor and One Note) reinstall fixed that.
So I am a happy camper.
Hope this helps anyone else with this essentially non-problem

Layback Bear · 25 Dec 2015

Keep this little formula in mind.
Windows 7 doesn't like to do a lot of things if their isn't 10 to 15% free space on the Windows 7 partition.

Did you get a warning pop up stating their wasn't enough space when you did the Repair Install?
If I remember correctly I always got a pop up under these conditions.

Rincewindwiz · 25 Dec 2015

Thank you for the thoughts.
It is a (relatively) small SSD partitioned with 100GB as the boot drive. So originally there was about 15% spare

The repair install didn't grumble at any stage and, at the end of the first failure, did not even say there was insufficient space - it just stopped with the unhelpful 'unable to continue' message.

The second time (21GB) it did at least have the decency to say it had run out of space