New
#1
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.