New
#1
Infinite Loop during install, but not like others I have read
Howdy,
I tried to search through the forums before posting. I've seen similar situations, but not the same as mine. Fortunately, I don't need anything on the HDD, so would be fine with wiping the HDD completely if I could only figure out how.
Here's the situation. I had upgraded from W7 Home Premium 32 bit to 64 bit, but started having driver issues, so I decided to go back to 32 bit. I can't remember where it was in the installation, but it looked like it had hung, so I tried to restart, and now find myself in this predicament:
Upon start-up, I get the "Windows is starting services" screen, and a bit later, I get a window that says "Install Windows X The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed. To install Windows, click "OK" to restart the installation. OK" If I resart, it obviously goes through the same thing.
The hard part is that even if I change the bios settings or go into the boot menu on startup, I can't get the computer to boot off of the usb drive (there is no optical drive). I'm assuming that this is the case because in a normal installation when the system restarts, it can't just keep booting from the installation media and starting the installation over. In this case, that's what I want it to do, but I can't.
If I try to cycle power to get into the menu that would let me boot in safe mode, I can, but then I just get a message that says installation can not be performed in
safe mode, and I'm back to the loop again.
The bios options are pretty limited - I can change the order of the boot menu, but can't disable the HDD.
Any advice on how to get out of this?
Here's what I know of my system specs:
Dell Vostro V13 laptop
4GB Ram
Bios Version A02