Win7 clean install won't complete

This post is remarkably similar to mine!

Help with install & build

If you find an answer, please let me know. I get the exact same error. After install finishes, computer reboots, reboot fails indicating something is corrupt. Run the repair tool, cant repair, look at the log and I get the exact same setup error.

Good luck.. I am on my 2nd week of troubleshooting. If I find a solution, I will post in here to let you know.

EDIT: Below is my setup. I am curious if we share any similarities:

Motherboard: Biostar TA790GXE 128m
CPU: AMD Athlon II x2 255 Regor 3.1ghz am3
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green 500 gb drive
DVD: Sony optiarc 24x DVDR sata model ad-7240s-ob
Mem: OCZ 4gb (2x2g) 240 pinn DDR2 SDRAM 1066(PC2 8500)(Have also tried 2gig)

DVD & HDD are hooked up using SATA cables.

20" Hanns-g monitor hooked up via HDMI (Have also tried VGA)

These installs have failed after reboot:
Win 7 x64 professional install dvd
Win 7 x32 home install dvd
Win 7 Enterprise install from USB (ISO downloaded)
DOS (win 98 version)

The log last entry will tell you what went wrong.

It is on the drive of the failed install, e.g.

"C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\setuperr.log"

Boot 7 dvd , go to command prompt, type

Notepad

when notepad appears, click File>Save, browse to the setuperr.log and have a look.

SIW2 said:

The log last entry will tell you what went wrong.

It is on the drive of the failed install, e.g.

"C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\setuperr.log"

Boot 7 dvd , go to command prompt, type

Notepad

when notepad appears, click File>Save, browse to the setuperr.log and have a look.

Not trying to threadjack, but what does it mean if this file is empty? Its size is 0kb.

You might find you have another setuperr.log in the Rollback directory.

Ibex,
Did you ever find a solution to your problem?

If you did, I'd be very interested in hearing the solution.

My research has only shown that Win7 seems to have problerms with 2TB harddrives, but I've found nothing definitive.

If you still can't get the install to work, then I'd suggest partitioning the harddrive into smaller partitions. For Win 7, loaded to the gills, 250 GB would more than suffice. I assume the reason you have such a large disk is that you want to be able to save videos, movies, music, pics of considerable size and quantity. You will also simplify many other backup and restore activities and problems by partitioning into smaller units. You have seen how long a simple write of zeros to your drive took when the computer wasn't doing anything else. You must think ahead to the day that the harddrive dies. You would like to have a backup of the drive before that happens. If drive A crashes, then you need a drive B ready to go in its place.

Give us an idea of what you plan to do with 1.5 Terabytes and we can probably make some suggestions as to how to utilize the space and handle backup in a reasonable manner.

sorry to be so slow to respond. Just started a new job today so no time in work hours anymore to look at this. Only got time at home (but at least I'm getting paid now).

No solution to the problem yet.

Re the 1.5 TB - no specific plans - it was just a good price point for disk/$.

I will partition the disk as described above and see what happens, although advice on how best to set it up is welcome. this will be the primary games machine - when it gets a new graphics card. Plus MP3 and movies.

At the moment I am trying an install with all "unnecessary" options disabled on mother board. eg USB3, com, parallel, floppy etc even though nothing installed on them.

Will report back soon.

SIW2 said:

The log last entry will tell you what went wrong.

It is on the drive of the failed install, e.g.

"C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\setuperr.log"

Boot 7 dvd , go to command prompt, type

Notepad

when notepad appears, click File>Save, browse to the setuperr.log and have a look.

I tried to do this. I have booted from the install CD and gone into notepad

In notepad I see 3 disk drives.
System reserved (C: )
Local Disk (D: )
Boot (X: )
and removable CD drive (E: )

X: has 4 folders Program Files, sources, users and Windows.
Sources has 4 folders en-US, inf, License and recovery and 3 files hwcompat, hwexclude and idwbinfo
recovery has 1 empty folder en-Us and no files

am I looking in the wrong place?

made a number of BIOS changes
Drive "A" set to none
IDE Channel o Master shows the disk ST31500341as
IDE Channel 0 slave shows NONE
IDE Channel 1 Master shows the DVD
IDE Channel 1 Slave thru IDE Channel 9 Slave all show NONE (are set to auto but report NONE)

eSATA, GSATA, COM and Parallel ports are disabled
Turbo SATA3/USB3.0 is disabled
Azalia is disabled
Onboard USB3 is disabled
onboard IDE is enabled
Extreme hard drive (XHD) is disabled.

the PCH SATA control mode is set to IDE
options are IDE, RAID(XHD) and ACHI. Should this beset to ACHI or is IDE the correct default?

Also confirmed First boot is Hard Disk and in disk priority the disk shows first in the list. Second boot is CDROM.

This has got me past the original error and into "Completing Installation".

However I took my eyes off it for a moment and it went into a reboot loop so I'm going to try again to see what happened.