Installation issues

Your problem might be that the installer doesn't have the IDE controller needed to run your Lightscribe DVD drive.

This could be why it installs from the XP environment which has that older driver.

Locate the Vista/WIn7 IDE controller driver on your model's Support Downloads page or Google. Or find its XP file location on IDE Controller Driver info tab in Device Manager.

I believe you can insert it by tapping F6 when drivers are first loading since you cannot get to the Custom installation screen which has the Load Drivers link.

If you must settle for installing from XP you can actually overwrite the XP partition doing a Custom clean install from the XP desktop. It will place your files in a windows.old folder from which you can later retrieve your files, and save the windows/system32/drivers and driverstore files to browse for the IDE driver if it is needed in the future.

bostonh said:

I suppose I should add the following info on my installation "stall":

Current Operating System, pre-install

• Do you have a single OS on your computer, are you planning on multi-booting with this installation?
Single/NA

• Are you multi-booting now?
No

Current Hardware

• How many internal hard drives (HD) are connected to your system?

• Are they IDE or SATA?
1 Internal West Digital 500gb SATA (connected to SATA0 port).

• How many DVD drives are connected to your system?

• Are they IDE or SATA Drives?
1 IDE Lightscribe DVD/CD drive

• Any external HDs used?

• Are they connected by USB or eSATA?
None

• Check Disk Management for any HDs listed with a yellow triangle and explanation point?
NA

• Is this a New Clean HD?
No, pulled out of computer working, with 2 partitions + free space. WinXP 32 bit on first partition. Goal is to format 1st partition and clean install Win7 64 bit.

• Have you pre-formatted the HD?
See above

Windows 7 installation details

• Which build number and version of Windows 7 are you installing?
Pro 64 bit

Installation Media

• From a DVD?
YES

The procedure and speed of burning the ISO to DVD has been the most frequent cause of installation failure

• How did you burn the DVD?
DigitalRiver download .iso and slow burn (4x)
The DVD has been checked and works fine on other computers.

Other

• Any Over Clocking of the RAM, CPU or GPU?
No

See above for additional hardware such as GPU/CPU/MOBO/RAM

Again, no additional connections, I am using a Microsoft wireless usb keyboard and mouse (3000 series?) which has worked fine as input in BIOS & post, and the mouse works fine when it gets to the stall point where the first install window fails to appear (right after Starting Windows screen).

First of all, I would like to apologizte that I forgot about this topic. In the meantime my problem was solved, and this is what was my problem:
So, since my computer was still in the guarantee period, so I brought into back into the store.
The problem was solved in 2 days: the motherboard's SATA controller wasn't working properly. At least they guessed that's the problem since sometimes the DVD burner just disappeared from the known devices.
So, it was the motherboards fault in my case.
I don't know if my solution helps you or not, but I recommend to take a closer look at the motherboard :)

I hope your computer will be okay :)

Regards,
Lacc

Okay! I have found the solution (in this case)! After hours of frustration, etc, etc.

So, I had ruled out the DVD since it worked fine on another computer.

I took all the steps as recommended by the troubleshooting threads such as remove extra ram, disconnect and disable ANYTHING unnecessary (though, in my case that turned out to be not needed) and still had this stall issue.

I found after trials and tribulations that if I ejected the DVD after a certain amount of time (a couple minutes) that the first window would come up.

*As someone suggested above, this sort of indicated that there might be something wrong with the optical drive in some way, drivers or what have you.

So I got to the "Install" screen, hit that, and after a few minutes of "Starting setup" screen ejected the DVD again and it gave me a screen that said necessary CD drivers not present (common message) yadda yadda. Well this is odd, my DVD drive uses the most basic of atapi drivers, which the windows setup of course has. SO, I decided to get a USB drive ready to startup off that in case I needed to disconnect the DVD drive, which was causing the stalls.

On my laptop, I get the USB drive formatted and files copied, but I can't load the bootloader because I'm trying to install 64bit on my desktop, and the laptop has 32bit vista. What a pain, I'm pretty frustrated at this point. On a whim, I try it anyway. No luck booting off the USB stick (*on a side note, with this gigabyte motherboard you have to select USBHDD instead of USBFDD to start off a USB flash disk drive).

So I throw the DVD in there again and it starts up, and I take it out at the specified time. Now, since the USB drive is still plugged in, and the DVD is out, even though it loaded the setup system off the DVD drive it's detecting drivers and copying files from the USB drive! Awesome! Success! Windows 7 loads smoothly and detects everything. SOLUTION! (I think)

Ok, so the above solution that I hobbled together worked to get windows 7 on the computer. It worked great, I thought I had solved the problem. However, when I went to load my first programs off a CD, the disk wouldn't read and just spun up (much like when I had system installation problems). Hmmmm, I thought to myself. WTF could be happening?

Well, I was looking around doing some google searches on my Samsung DVD drive model number and came across a post from GorfTheFrog on Toms Hardware that I must have missed the first time around ( Vista64 Install Won't Recognize Samsung SH-S222 - DVD-CD-Writers - Storage ) and he had success just changing his IDE CABLE FROM A GENERIC TO THE ONE THAT CAME WITH THE MOTHERBOARD. I've had extensive experience with EE and CE back in college and this defied common sense as well but I was out of options so I gave it a try.

This. Fixed. Everything. Hours of frustration and a trip to best buy to pick up a 4gb flash drive for nothing (well, we can't say that, if it wasn't difficult it wouldn't be the same sense of accomplishment, right? I'm rationalizing here, back away from the cliff, self). So in the end, even though the dvd drive worked fine in my other system with that ide cable, switching ide cables fixed everything.

I hope my story can save someone else some time. In summary my suggestions are:

TL;DR:

1. When installing a new motherboard, use cables the motherboard came with if at all possible, pack away any old cables rather than re-use them unless you need them down the road.

2. If you can't get you DVD disk to work right, and you can't get a USB drive to boot, try booting from the DVD disk and pulling it out once windows starts. Leave the USB drive plugged in and the windows setup should copy everything fine from the USB drive (assuming your BIOS and Win setup recognize the USB drive).



If anyone has any questions, let me know.

Interesting.

There are two ways to create a bootable Win7 flash stick:

Format the stick Primary in Disk Management and copy the files from DVD into the stick's root exactly as they appear on DVD. Now boot using BIOS F-key to access Boot Menu and look under Hard Drives

Download UltraISO trial and write the ISO to flash stick using Bootable tab. Boot as above.

If you do not have a BIOs Boot Menu F-key (look on first bootup screen) then look for the flash stick under Hard Drives in your BIOS and set it to boot first.

I install my os's from an external hard drive using a usb connection and it works very smoothly.