Endless Black Screen Instead of Rebooting During Installation

You can use a System Repair Disc or a Win 7 DVD to boot to a command prompt.

From there you can run diskpart to prepare your harddrive.



COMMAND PROMPT - GO TO A COMMAND PROMPT USING A SYSTEM REPAIR DISC

1) Insert System Repair Disc into optical reader.
2) Shutdown your computer.
3) Boot up your computer from the System Repair Disc
If your computer doesn’t boot from the optical drive, then
Immediately after pushing your Power ON button, start tapping the F2 key to get to the BIOS to change the boot order.OR
Immediately after pushing your Power ON button, start tapping the F12 key and choose CD/DVD to change the boot order only for this time.
4) Wait while a mini-version of Windows is loaded and finally the System Recovery Options dialog appears.
5) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS dialog |
Select a keyboard input method |
NEXT button
6) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS dialog
will search your system for installed versions of Windows.
7) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS dialog |
select the Use recovery tools that can help fix problems starting Windows radio button |
NEXT button
8) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS |
Choose a recovery tool |
9) Click on command prompt from the list shown

Run any desired commands and type EXIT when finished.
Remove the System Repair Disc.
Shutdown your computer.
Power on your computer.

COMMAND PROMPT - GO TO A COMMAND PROMPT USING YOUR WIN 7 DVD

■Boot up from your Windows 7 DVD.
■At the first dialog window, press SHIFT + F10 key combo
■You will have a X:> command prompt
X: is a ram drive created by Windows 7.

DISC - CREATE A SYSTEM REPAIR DISC

START | type System Repair | Enter key | Create Disc button



Clean Install - Prepare a drive for

Bare Foot Kid said:

Hello again.



You don't have to have an installed OS to do a "clean all" to a HDD, you just boot the installer disk and at the "language" screen you hold down the "Shift" key and hit the F10 hot-key to open a command window; have a good look at this tutorial.

SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation

Oooooh, thanks! That'll definitely save me some trouble!

Bare Foot Kid said:

ObliviousSage said:

Bare Foot Kid said:

Hello again.



You don't have to have an installed OS to do a "clean all" to a HDD, you just boot the installer disk and at the "language" screen you hold down the "Shift" key and hit the F10 hot-key to open a command window; have a good look at this tutorial.

SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation

Oooooh, thanks! That'll definitely save me some trouble!

Yes, it's very good to use, you can do everything needed before the install, just remember not to use the installer to format what you create as it'll remove it all.

Yes, I saw that in the guide.

Question: It wasn't entirely clear in the guide, if I have an HDD rather than an SSD, do I still need the to include the align portion of the create partition command? The friend I was planning on spending the evening with had something come up, and since this is way faster than mucking about with Knoppix I figured I'd go ahead and give it a shot.

Bare Foot Kid said:

It's said that it's not necessary for HDDs but I don't believe it'll hurt one way or the other, it has something to do with the way the page is laid out on some SSDs as some don't require an align.

OK, I went ahead and did it with align=0, which I would assume is the default if you don't specify (if not specifying one is an option, though I agree with you that it probably is).

Hopefully this fixes the issue. *crosses fingers*

ObliviousSage said:

Bare Foot Kid said:

It's said that it's not necessary for HDDs but I don't believe it'll hurt one way or the other, it has something to do with the way the page is laid out on some SSDs as some don't require an align.

OK, I went ahead and did it with align=0, which I would assume is the default if you don't specify (if not specifying one is an option, though I agree with you that it probably is).

Hopefully this fixes the issue. *crosses fingers*

No luck.

Will probably re-install XP on Monday and see what the Upgrade Advisor says.