Hardware | words

Windows 7 Install Freezing at “Starting Windows” Animation

Windows 7 was very troublesome to install on my system. My system specifications:

Motherboard: Biostar TF8200 A2+ (nVidia chipset)
Processor: AMD 4080e Athlon 64 x2 (45W version)
Memory: 4GB
Optical: Sony/NEC SATA DVD-RW
Hard Disk: Seagate SATA 320GB, 7200RPM

Installation would hang at the “Starting Windows” logo. By pressing F8 when the installer first loaded, and selecting “Safe Mode With Command Prompt”, I was able to see that it was hanging after loading DISK.SYS.

I experimented with SATA and AHCPI modes. I replaced the old PATA/IDE DVD-ROM drive with a new SATA one. I tried removing one of my 2GB memory sticks. I tried both the x64 and x86 versions. None of these changes made any difference whatsoever

In the end, the only thing that worked was to turn off all motherboard accessories. I believe I only needed to turn off the USB 2.0 controller, but to be safe I turned off all USB, audio, parallel port, floppy drive, etc.

Now that Windows 7 is fully installed, I’m still unable to use the USB 2.0 functionality.

As an aside, I reinstalled the OS two more times because I kept getting a black screen with the “Windows Release Candidate Build 7100″ in the lower, right corner. After several frustrating hours, I realized that the problem was simply that I had both the VGA and DVI connectors plugged into my monitor! The installation had been continuing just fine, but on the other monitor input!

Boot from USB Stick on Biostar TF8200 A2+

I was tired of burning perfectly good DVDs repeatedly for Windows 7 beta testing. Instead, I decided to follow these excellent instructions and copy the contents of the ISO image onto a USB stick and boot from that.

My Biostar TF8200 A2+ motherboard has an American Megatrends BIOS. Configuring it to boot from a thumb drive is a bit tricky. Here are the steps:

Insert the USB thumb drive.
Enter BIOS setup.
Go to Advanced, then USB Configuration, then USB Mass Storage Device Configuration, then select CDROM for Emulation Type.
Press F10 to save BIOS changes and reboot. You must reboot for the BIOS to view the thumb drive as a CD-ROM drive.
Enter BIOS Setup.
Go to Boot, then CD/DVD Drives. Select “USB: USB DISK 2.0″ as your 1st CD drive (assuming you have a real CD/DVD-ROM drive).
Go back to Boot Settings Configuration, go to Boot Device Priority, and select USB: USB DISK 2.0 as the 1st boot device.
Save BIOS changes and reboot.
When prompted, press any key to boot from the “CD-ROM” (really the USB stick).

In the end, I wasn’t able to get the system to boot from the USB drive as a virtual CD-ROM drive. It would only boot from the USB drive if I changed the emulation to “Hard disk”.