Problems leading to problems...

Hello, I am new to the forum, and I am hoping someone can help me out.

I am attempting to install Win 7RC 64 bit on my system and seem to run into another problem as soon as I solve one. I am now at a problem that has me at a loss. Bear with me as I outline what I have done so far.

I had been previously running Windows XP (x64) on this machine, but I was getting tired of the problems with it, including worse stability than most Microsoft products, which in my experiance says a lot. Anyway, back to the topic. Having decided to try out Windows 7 I downloaded the RC installer image and - after spending lots of time backing everything up - I tried installing it last night. I should mention that I have four SATA hard drives, three of which are in a RAID 5 configuration, the other I use as the system disk. The RAID setup is integrated in the motherboard. Now in the installer the first time I tried it, it got as far as asking me where I wanted to install it to and showed a blank list of drives, telling me I may need to install drivers. I booted back to my XP install and made a drivers floppy diskette. After a bit of minor details, the installer was able to see both logical drives (the system and the RAID). I continued with the setup and eventually got to a desktop, and breathed a sigh of relief, I thought the installation was done and I could begin installing my applications and such.

Almost immediately after the desktop's appearance there came a message asking if I would like to install an update that was available. I decided there shouldn't be any harm in that, and since I hadn't started anything else, another restart wouldn't inturrupt anything. When the system rebooted after the update, it gave me a BSOD right after the windows splash screen that follows the "loading windows" screen. Repeated attempts ended in the same way, and I still had nowhere to start because it was restarting immediately after showing the blue screen for a fraction of a second (not nearly enough time to figure out what error was causing this. I tried restarting the entire install, and it went through all of the normal steps, but once it needed to restart to "finish installation" It would BSOD after the Windows splash and was never able to do so. I went through that again, and ended up with a startup screen asking which of three Windows 7 installations I would like to boot, or press F8 for advanced options. In this list of advanced options I tried most of (including safe mode, debug mode, and others) the only one that proved to give any more information or luck was an option to disable the automatic restart in the case of a crash. This allowed me to find out that the BSOD was giving me a "REGISTRY_ERROR" along with some jibberish technical addresses at the bottom that I probably should have written down but never did. Anyway, in the middle of all that I also tried the automatic startup recovery wizard, which could never find a diagnosable problem nor could it find a cure.

After consulting a friend, I booted into the linux distribution GParted where I reformatted, then decided to delete the system partition. After booting back into the installer with an unallocated drive, I told setup to create and format a partition on it. It then gave me the following error: "Failed to format the selected partition. [Error: 0x80070057]." I'm at a loss for where to go from here, but found one suggestion to try it using only one stick of RAM that I will try, and then I will see if I can find an EIDE drive lying around to try installing on to narrow the possibilities. I would greatly appreciate any advice, and hope to get this working soon.

Thanks
~Morranr

First off welcome to the sevenforums here! While you booted with the lvie GParted cd you should have created and formatted the new primary for 7 following the deletion of the first. The drive partitioning tools for 7 are still a work in progress if you follow the meaning.

Some system specifications might help here as well with your mention of removing "one stick of RAM" without mention of how much memory you are running. With 7 most of the problems seen with over 2gb installed seemed to be tied to particular chipsets since the 64bit RC installed here with 4gb without any issue. But you also tried to install 7 onto a then "raw" drive where the drive tools tend to lack at times.

Thanks for the welcome and the reply. I have not yet had a chance to try either of the things I mentioned before and will try your suggestion of formatting with GParted first. I assume ntfs would be a good file system for this?

Sorry for the lack of details regarding memory - when I did a search for the error I was getting I found someone suggesting that. I don't have the technical details available at the moment, but I am using four 2GB chips - 8GB total. If you need anything more specific than that, tell me what you need and I'll let you know.

~Morranr

NTFS is native for 7 to start with. Unlike XP that saw backward compatibility to Fat16/32 both Vista and 7 have to be installed onto an ntfs primary. When booted from the live and you click on the primary to point it out like making any open window the active window you simply right click on the primary itself and scroll down a bit to the ntfs item seen in the dropdown list there.

What can happen at times is people will simply click the apply button while having gone too fast and clicked on "ext2" or "ext3" instead and then wondering why they are having problems seeing Windows go on. Those are native to Linux there.

As far as 8gb that possibly could be a problem or having all dimm slots full is often another on some boards. If you see problems during the installation like error messages come up on you first try removing all but the first 2gb dimm until 7 is running. If problems continue afterwards it may be related to seeing all slots populated.