Windows 7 installation hangs before final set-up stage

Hi folks,
My Dad is having problems upgrading to Windows 7 from the original Vista installation on his Medion MD8833 PC, using a W7 Home Premium Upgrade Edition disk.

He first tried the upgrade route from Vista and this seemed to go OK, until after the second or third reboot it would get to a point and then freeze at a blank screen, with the mouse cursor still visible. If left for a long period of time, the PC appears to go into sleep mode.

Attempts to reboot at this point make it look like W7 has been installed, at least partially, as it'll go through the usual W7 load-up splash screens but he's unable to get to the part of the process where you have to enter your W7 serial key or start setting up user accounts etc.

He's tried F8 and booting into Safe Mode and various other modes but had no success here either. This often results in being told the installation process has not completed and attempts to revert to Vista are started.

He's even resorted to wiping the hard drive completely (inc. recovery partition) and doing a fresh install, but has exactly the same problems.

Does anyone have any ideas ?

It seems to me as if W7 has almost installed but the final part of the process keeps getting interrupted.

I've read through the common problems sticky and other threads about problems with W7 upgrades, including the black screens of death and installations getting stuck at a known 'X' percent, but this doesn't seem to be happening in this case.

Can hardware conflicts cause W7 installation to hang ? I was concerned that there might be a component in the PC that W7 takes exception too, however there are other users on the Medion forum who have installed W7 without a problem. The W7 compatibility checker he ran beforehand only highlighted problems with software, not hardware.

It's got 3GB RAM and there's a thread above about problems with >2GB in some mobos - should I try removing 1GB ?

There has been a BIOS update for this motherboard (March 2009) - could this be needed for installing Windows 7 does anyone know ? The PC is only 2 years old (2008).

We've obtained a new W7 upgrade disk so we know that a dodgy disk isn't the problem either.

Any help and advice would be much appreciated !

Cheers.

Take a look at these posts:

https://www.sevenforums.com/installat...-problems.html

Tutorial quick reference list for Installing Windows 7

Questions to use for help with Installation Issues

Many thanks for all your helpful replies.

I've just found out that he had two monitors connected and it looks like this was causing the problem. He has subsequently disconnected one of them and W7 looks to be installing correctly this time.

I'd already read the threads you linked to, so had asked him to disconnect everything that wasn't essential, but it looks like he overlooked having both monitors connected. Both of these monitors had been connected when he ran the advisor tool initially and the tool only mentioned problems with some software, not hardware.

He's just disconnected one of the monitors, attempted a clean install and has been able to get to the serial key screen, but the problem now is that his upgrade serial key is not being accepted (despite him having had a genuine install of Vista previously FWIW).

So - it looks like you can't always do a 'clean' install with an upgrade disk, despite what I've read on the stickies above.

He's currently reinstalling Vista and attempting an upgrade from there.

I'll report back if any further useful observations crop up.

Thanks folks.

That is good here.

What you describe sounds like the common problem seen here of someone with a video or tv tuner card outputted to a projector or other monitor, so that the VGA signal goes blank at the point the installer loads the video/tv tuner card driver.

You can indeed clean install using Upgrade installer using the workaround given here: http://community.winsupersite.com/bl...he-answer.aspx

I ran into a similar problem with a Dell desktop that only had a 64 mb video card. The install would go fine up until the final restart and would hang with a blank screen. My thinking was to install Win7 without the aero functions and try it out before updating to a 256MB video card. Long story short, I had to buy a new graphic card and install it before win7 would finish the install.