yet another installation problem

[jbaruch76]

ok, i have gone through all the threads and tried just about everything but am still having problems. first i could not get past the first screen that has the blue wallpaper. then i disabled all non essentials in the bios which allowed me to get a bit further. however everytime i try it freezes at a different place. sometimes it is as it is loading files, or when it says "installing is stargin". a couple times i got to the screen where you choose what disk to use, but then froze as i tried to erase a drive. once i got past that and it froze on "opening files" (or something along those lines). and one time i even got past that and the computer restated and then froze on a screen that said something like "completing installation".
also, i can no longer boot into my vista partition, and i also already tried reinstalling vista and i run into similar problems. so i can't check my drivers or format my disk etc.
i know there are many threads like this but it is very difficult to figure out exactly what will apply to me.
so these are my specs off the top of my head since i can't access device manager or anything.
core 2 duo 3.0 ghz
3.5 gb ram
nvidia geforce 8500
gigabyte ga-ep35dslr mobo

any and all help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Tews]

Welcome to the forums!!

Your situation is a frustrating one, but dont give up hope.. Your first order of business is to format your drive.. Some will say to do this during the install process, but in your case, I would suggest downloading Ubuntu and use its liveCD function, and format your hard drive using gparted...

Once you have done this, try a reinstall.. post your results..

Good Luck

 

[theog]

Hi jbaruch76

Try installing with 2g ram.

 

[jbaruch76]

i managed to get the partition formatted. however now every time it gets stuck on "expanding files". also when i bypass the dvd-boot i get a message that bootmgr is missing. i will try removing one of the ram modules to see if anything happens.


EDIT - tried removing one and it didn't do anything . all it does is get to "expanding windows files" it stays at 0% and eventually it hangs.

also, every time that i have mentioned the screen froze it actually just turned off as if the computer were turned off but when it sticks at 0% the screen is still up for a couple of minutes.

 

[Tews]

You may have better luck extracting the contents of the DVD to the partition and running setup.exe from there..

 

[jbaruch76]

You may have better luck extracting the contents of the DVD to the partition and running setup.exe from there..

could you help me out with the steps of this? i have never tried to do that before.

 

[Tews]

If you are using a DVD, then copy all of the contents of the DVD to the formatted partition. Open the partition in explorer and run the setup.exe file to start the installation....

 

[jbaruch76]

If you are using a DVD, then copy all of the contents of the DVD to the formatted partition. Open the partition in explorer and run the setup.exe file to start the installation....

ohhh, i thought there was somethign i could do before booting os. this method is a problem because i no longer have any os installed and neither disk (7 and vista) don't work.

 

[MrMegabyte]

One thing if you have another computer and a 4 GB thumb drive and install windows 7 from the thumb drive. Here is a link to do that successfully Creating Bootable Vista / Windows 7 USB Flash Drive at Kevin’s Blog, however these instructions were done using windows vista...so if you have an xp machine the format command under diskpart wont work. Also if you haven't clean the DVD that you have or you might have a bad image of Windows 7.

 

[jbaruch76]

One thing if you have another computer and a 4 GB thumb drive and install windows 7 from the thumb drive. Here is a link to do that successfully Creating Bootable Vista / Windows 7 USB Flash Drive at Kevin’s Blog, however these instructions were done using windows vista...so if you have an xp machine the format command under diskpart wont work. Also if you haven't clean the DVD that you have or you might have a bad image of Windows 7.

tried this and my machine doesn't even get to the startup screen, just the loading files with the gray bar on the bottom. i am going to try a different version of 7 see if maybe that is the problem.

 

[jbaruch76]

so i have now tried three different versions and every time it is the same thing. it hangs at 0% on "expanding windows files". does anyone know what is going on here? maybe it can't write to the hard drive or something?

edit - i've tried everything. i can't even get a copy of xp to install. could there be something wrong with my hard drive? i don't know what else it could be.