New Windows 7 install won't boot, installed fine.

[dezork]

Hi,

I recently built a new machine. I installed Windows to my drive, a 1TB Western Digital. Installed worked fine, but at the
stage 'preparing your desktop', it just says 'shutting down' then 'logging off', and then starts rebooting up to the point where it would load the OS, then reboots again.

What gives? I tried re-installing the OS, same exact thing happened.

The drive currently has 2 partitions, I'm installing on one of them.

ideas?

 

[sminlal]

Any chance you switched the mode of your SATA controller from AHCI to IDE Emulation after installing? The symptoms you're describing sound similar.

 

[dezork]

Very unlikely, I don't even know how to do this in my BIOS. Windows installation got almost all the way to the desktop when it just shut down, and now does not even load.

This is very bizarre.

 

[dezork]

Any chance you switched the mode of your SATA controller from AHCI to IDE Emulation after installing? The symptoms you're describing sound similar.

I looked in my BIOS, the SATA controller was set to IDE mode... I changed it, but the drive still fails to boot. No message, nothing- just reboots the system.

Should I try re-installing with the new setting?

 

[sminlal]

If you've got the time you can try it, but you're actually a little better off with the controller in AHCI mode.

Before doing that you should probably try booting in "Safe Mode" if possible to see if that works. If it does, the event logs may shed some light on what's happening.

 

[dezork]

If you've got the time you can try it, but you're actually a little better off with the controller in AHCI mode.

Before doing that you should probably try booting in "Safe Mode" if possible to see if that works. If it does, the event logs may shed some light on what's happening.

How can I boot into safe mode if the OS doesn't load at all?

Arg this is so frustrating.

 

[dezork]

Anyone?

 

[sminlal]

I guess the next thing to do is to make sure that all of the components in your system are properly seated just in case there's some sore of hardware glitch. That includes cables, PCI cards, RAM etc. And if that doesn't work then maybe even try reseating the CPU if you're confident you understand how to remove the heat sink and reassemble it with thermal paste when you're done.

If all that doesn't work, it's probably time to try the reinstall from scratch.

 

[dezork]

After about 8 hours of puzzling over it, I fixed it! I can't believe it.

For anyone who was wondering, the boot sector of the disk needed to be fixed. I pulled the drive, plugged it into another computer. Then I simply ran bootsect from the install disk and targeted the drive (bootsect /nt60 g It re-wrote the boot sector, voila, it works!

God. Damn.

Thanks for the help everyone. Sometimes these solutions just need you to try everything XD.

 

[sminlal]

Congratulations, and thanks for sharing the solution with us - I'm sure it will help someone else who runs into this.

 

[tisha woods]

Hey

This information is great. One of my client also faced this same thing. I struggled a lot but couldn't resolve the issue. Finally we need to change his pc. I would definitely try this and see whether it's going to help me. Thanks...