Windows 7 Pro installation woes...

[billygoat333]

So I decided with the major storm yesterday that it would give me a great excuse to finally install my copy of win7 pro onto my desktop. What started out as an easy, 1 hr or so job has turned into a nightmare. tl:dr; at bottom.

1st problem: I put in the disk to do a clean install (apparently you can't go from xp mce 2005 to win 7 pro) and got through the language and start install screens. I did a custom install to wipe the drive before I installed onto it to get rid of all the crud on the old hdd. All is good. As soon as I get to the getting started screen... It freezes. No problem, a quick google search comes up that some older boards don't like to install with more than 2gb of ram. Pulled out my 2x512mb ram to have 2 gb to install with. groovy, things are looking up.

2nd problem: after the install, the computer restarts. Thanks to the wonderful programming gods at Microsoft, the dvd boots up again (because I had it set as boot priority over the HDD, of course) and tries to once again install the operating system... causing an infinite loop of error messages and restarts. Come to find out, when installing win 7 pro you have to either change your boot order or eject the dvd so it doesn't load the setup again. dumb dumb dumb, got a copy of Ultimate boot cd and wiped the drive clean again.

3rd Problem and where I am at now: I re-installed ONCE again... and this time changed my boot order as hdd first, dvd second. all good, restarts and boots into win 7 no problem. NOW... after about 5 min of being operable, the system BSODs on me. wonderful... I write down the error and restart again.

keeps doing it to me. I can enter into safe mode, and everything checks out ok through there (ran ccleaner to fix registry errors, there were already 12 errors from a fresh install. ) still keeps giving me problems.

SO the only thing I can come up with from google searches(I am wiping the drive yet again) is that I have older hardware that *MIGHT* not be supported by win 7 - even though there are no device errors in Device Manager or driver problems.

tl:dr;

Win 7 pro install sucks. Can't stop system from BSODs.

I reburned the *.iso (got off my student MSDN account) at the slowest burn speed and tried the install again, but still had errors. going to try once more after swiping the drive once again. any other suggestions?

[dooglo]

Sorry to here about your woes with install. I only have 1 suggestion, try these guys here... http://www.sevenforums.com/ Very informative forum. Hope they can help you.

D.

[SXRguyinMA]

click start, then type "event viewer" in the search box and hit enter. once in, go to "Windows Logs" (on left), then "System", and any errors will be there, marked with either a red circle or a yellow triangle, that will tell you what exactly caused the BSOD

[billygoat333]

Event viewer is unfortunately blank... but I did happen to catch the most common BSOD that says its the amdk8.sys process that caused the problem. The system is acting like it is overheating, but checking the temps in HWMonitor they are at a relatively fine 35C.

a few websites say that it could be a voltage problem... but I never had issues with XP and my old 300w PSU.

I have a new PSU on the way so that should clear up the lack of power issue. Hopefully that is it.

EDIT: I might add that the system will randomly hang, as well. won't BSOD, just won't respond at all.

[Trace]

Try boosting the vCore...I actually had this happen on my system a little bit ago.

[Luke122]

I'd also strip down the hardware to bare minimum. Remove any/all unnecessary hardware devices, and see if the system stabilizes.

Bad ram? Try a reseat?

[billygoat333]

good idea, ram WAS working fine, with XP. I will check them though.

Trace, my motherboard's Bios is locked, so no playing with voltages Is there a software solution? (I looked into AMD's, but it isn't compatible with my old chipset)