Azuki Panda

So it’s been a long time since I’ve made any posts on here. I’ve been pretty busy over the summer with around 50 hours of work in the lab per week. I’m also taking 20 credit hours this semester to pick up a math minor and combined with all the medical school stuff it really wears down on my spare time.

This weekend was fall break so I decided to take this time to install Windows 7 (I know I’m a bit late on installing it since it got leaked all the way back in July). I’ve been running the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) on my laptop since about May so I thought it was about time I transitioned to Windows 7 on my desktop as well. Windows 7 is scheduled to be released on October 22, so this isn’t that much in advance. Besides, my desktop has been having trouble shutting down sometimes - not sure what’s going on but sometimes it’ll freeze on the screen that says that Windows is shutting down. I didn’t have Vista on either system and even though XP ran fine on my desktop I felt satisfied enough with Windows 7 to make the switch.

Last time I installed Windows 7 I did it using an external drive. I didn’t have a large enough USB so I had a 4 GB partition on one of my external drives for the purpose of installing Windows. I used that same partition and copied all the files for the Retail Ultimate copy onto that partition after deleting the RC files. I plugged it in via USB and went about the install. The USB external enclosure was not cooperating so I just hooked it up inside the desktop. Another thing that I want to mention at this point is that my desktop has 2 SATA drives, a Seagate 300 GB for system files and games, and a Samsung Spinpoint 1 TB drive for media files (movies, TV shows, music, etc.). I had backed up all of my files including school stuff onto the 1 TB drive since I don’t have a dedicated external drive for backups.

When I restarted the computer and selected the install drive from the boot menu everything seemed to go pretty smoothly. It was when it got to restarting the computer to finish the install that it started to go downhill. The first time it got stuck on a black screen. No good. I restarted the computer and this time it was even worse - as the computer was booting up I was greeted with the following message:

BOOTMGR is missing

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

I thought to myself that it was just a minor issue and that I could just repair the install. That didn’t work. I was able to finally get it to boot if I went to the boot menu and selected the install drive to boot from. So at this point I realized that Windows must have written part of the boot files on the install drive while the system files were on the Seagate SATA drive. Great. That just means I’m going to have to reinstall the system. I was relieved to find a DVD-RW sitting in a pile of stuff so it would be perfect to use to install the OS. The DVD burner on my desktop wasn’t being recognized since it was treating the install drive with higher priority for the same hardware location. It wasn’t a big deal to fix it right then since my laptop could also burn DVDs and I can just transfer the file over the home network. Some time between finding the DVD-RW and burning the image on my laptop my 1 TB drive failed. Also, I had burned the wrong thing since I just burned the files from the image and not the actual image itself so the DVD wasn’t bootable. I could reburn the install image, but that was on the failed hard drive.

I’ll detail the rest of the hard drive problems in a following post.

I re-downloaded the image for the install disk and burned that to the DVD-RW and reinstalled the system. This time everything went smoothly since I disconnected all other drives to ensure that it would be installed correctly.

So far Windows 7 has been pretty good, nothing out of the ordinary. Install time was about an hour. Boot up and shut down times are fast, which is to be expected of any new OS install.

I’ll try to get some pictures of the install process up whenever I have some time to get around to it.