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Windows fails to start after clean install
A rather peculiar problem I have encountered.
I consider myself a very experienced user, many years of computer building and OS installing.
This one has me stumped.
I have an older PC, a GA07N400S-L mobo with 512mb memory, Sempron2600 processor. All basic hardware is currently disabled, only the AGP and SATA ports are enabled. Through much surfing, I have found that the hardware I have should work based on the successes of others with similar configurations.
The issue:
Installed Windows 7 32bit on a fresh install. Everything during this process is normal, virtually identical to a vista install AND an install of win7 on my "newer" box. In that particular case, SATA RAID was used for the primary drives. I encountered no issues whatsoever.
On this gigabyte machine, as I said, everything appeared normal. I observed screen blanking and then refreshing to show me a higher resolution and colour count...tells me the driver for the video worked....so far, install at this point is as expected. I also am presented at near the end of the install process to provide a login name, computer name and the next screen, the password. Done and done and done. The computer appears at this point to be ready to fully go to the OS and then gives a "shutting down" message, afterwhich, the pc will then reboot.
And then reboot and reboot and reboot and rebooot...you get the idea...
Pressing F8 at the appropriate time does NOT give me safe mode. Pressing it like a tap dancer does not give me safe mode. The computer simply blanks out and I am presented with the POST for another round.
I have tried startup recovery from the DVD, but the startup diagnostics yields no problems, even stating that windows started fine. Not from my perspective it did. System restore is equally useless as there is no restore point created yet.
I have tried using standard hard drive as well.
Vista installed without any issues, virtually identical. Yet Windows 7 fails at boot time.
Is there any diagnostics tools available to help me determine just what the issue is?