Windows 7 endless reboot answer evades Microsoft

That doesn't sound good. Thankfully my upgrade went quite smoothly (from Vista Home Premium).

I often wonder how many people - have there bios set for boot priority.
1. USB
2. DVD-CD Device
3. HDD
(I love my F-12) CHOSE BOOT DEVICE. (If you do not it returns to Default - HDD.)after 30s.
when you first BOOT to device 1-2 or 3 the popup says
"hit any key to boot to ?"
now about 50% of the way thru, all files are on the HDD, and Win 7 REBOOTS, (Yes a FULL REBOOT) that is when you should
1. remove the bootable USB or
2. remove the bootable DVD

I went to one home, and there was 9 Windows.old versions on the HDD.
every time it booted to the DVD and restarted the install all over and set a new windows.old.

Oh my god he screemed and your going to charge me $35.00 to remove the DVD. so Windows 7 can complete the install.
YES, was the answer.... as I stuck the DVD in my case. When your check clears I'll return the DVD. He paid in CASH.

Clean installs ALWAYS win!

I have a Dell XPS M1530 Notebook which was running Vista Home Premium. I purchased the student Digital River upgrade download and went to upgrade my OS on Friday... Toward the end of the upgrade installation, the system rebooted and ,after failing the Windows 7 load, said it would roll me back to Vista. The rollback boot also failed so my machine kept rebooting endlessly. I spent 6+hours on the phone with MS and must say I got a very knowledgeable technician... We tried a custom install which again failed with a generic error message (Computer unexpectedly restarted and we will roll you back).

We were finally able to get the custom install to work by disabling all extra services and functions in the Bios (USB, Wireless Network, Bluetooth, etc.). Basically we disabled everything but the onboard NIC and the DVD drive. When we ran the install in that state, the problem was solved. Then when we reenabled all those devices Win7 started normally, recognized the devices and they all seem to work.

I did, however, lose all of my existing programs and had a very difficult time first finding my saved files (I think they were in a directory called $windows.~tr\machine\), then after recovering my files, troubleshooting file permissions on most of those files. I believe they were owned by my old non-existent user account.

Setup did create a directory called windows.old but there was no usable data in there, only the base file structure I had. This directory was very hard to delete as there was a folder called desktop under my old user name that was nested 20+ levels deep (i.e., users\username\desktop\desktop
desktop...). This filename was too large for Windows or the command prompt to deal with... The technician was able to remote in and get it deleted by a series of copying and renaming that eventually truncated the filename to a length that the system could handle.

Also, there were two other directories prefaced with a $ that did not contain much usable data and could not be easily deleted (had to take ownership and reset security permissions on them. These $ prefaced directories were very large and very hard to delete. They were remnants of the original upgrade attempt.

At any rate I am up and running now and will know better how things are going after I get all my programs installed.

The lesson learned may be to disable all non essential devices during the upgrade installation. I think that in my case, the bluetooth module may have caused the fault that the setup program could not recover from.

John M., MCP