Installation hang on clean install

I am posting this one for information only, I solved the problem finally. I had a dual boot setup running Win & RC1 and XP. I bought a couple of copies of 7 when it came out and sat down to install the Professional copy on the machine already running the OS. Just for kicks I ran the Microsoft fitness utility before starting install. All I got was a warning on 3 software items. I had 3 hard drives in the system at the time, a Seagate 750 GB SATA, a Seagate 1 TB SATA and an old Western Digital 80 GB IDE drive. I wiped the 750 GB drive clean and started a clean install.

Installation would proceed until setup tried to reboot the computer and it would hang at the "Press any key to boot from DVD." I did this 3 times (hardheaded and stupid) and I got the same result each time. I did notice on the 3rd try that Windows was running an integrity check on the IDE drive just before the hangup so I opened the case and disconnected the IDE drive and rebooted. The installation completed without a problem.

I know that this forum suggests disconnecting hardware before the Win 7 install but I didn't know that at the time of my problem. What bothers me is that the Microsoft readiness utility didn't warn me of the problem plus I was able to install the RC1 copy okay with the exact same hardware setup.

I hope this info might come in handy for someone who runs into a similar problem.

:)