Is there a windows doctor in the house???
This really shouldn't be so hard -- trying to install windows 7 on a PC I'm building for a friend. Done this a bunch of times before, don't know why this build is giving me fits.
Anyway -- problem is that the install never completely finishes. OS builds, assign a user name, name the computer.....we get to the point where the screen says "preparing desktop" and then we go to "shutting down" and then the Bios screen, then screen goes black, then the Bios screen, then screen goes black, then the Bios screen.....just loops over and over.
Doesn't seem to be anything hardware related as I threw a Ubuntu build on the machine with no problems. Tried different memory, a different HD -- same end result.
Anyone do this for a living (or a side job) and seen something like this before? Any ideas??
thanks!
Try going into your BIOS settings and look for something called ACPI 2.0 support, try setting it to the opposite of wherever it's currently set. I ran into something just like this installing Server 2008 on some Dell or Sun Servers that were donated to our Institute. I think there was one other setting that I had to turn off, but I don't remember off-hand what it was. It was some feature like that, which wasn't supported by all operating systems. I either couldn't get the install to finish, or the install would finish and the OS would never boot, doing something like the problem you are having (looping back to the BIOS, reboot, BIOS, reboot, or BIOS, Windows, reboot....)
I remember now, in my particular case I had to disable ACPI HPET support and something called Native PSS support. Those are very possibly specific to the hardware we were using, but I think there is a good chance that some feature in the BIOS is preventing yours from firing up. If it's not that, I suppose it could be a driver. I think there is a way to boot Windows into verbose mode (it might be somewhere in the options where you choose Safe Mode), and if it even gets to Windows, it will show every little driver as it loads, and it might give you an idea what isn't working. You could also try unplugging any extra devices (optical drive, fancy video card - try booting using just the onboard video). If you unplug all the extra stuff and it still doesn't make it to Windows, I would bet on it being some funky BIOS setting. The kinds of motherboards that people usually use to build their own computers sometimes have extra special features, and sometimes they don't work. So in that case I'd try disabling the non-standard features that the BIOS offers for that board. Sorry for the long-windedness. Hope you make some headway with it ! :D
thanks for the help -- nothing's working yet, still looking for a solution 
