Windows 7 on MSI K9N Platinum (nForce 570 SLI)
Recently, a fresh Windows install[1] was due on my home PC primarily used by my parents and family after my switch to a MacBook about a year ago.
However, whenever I tried to start the installation routine, the setup would boot into the "Windows is starting"-screen with the nicely animated glowing 7-logo[2], but stay there indefinitely without an error message. When starting the setup in safe mode (I had to press F5 or F6 during start-up IIRC), the setup would just hang after
I started searching the internet for similar problems and found a couple of recommendations related to nForce chipsets. Some told you to disable your on-board LAN ports (which I happen not using anyway) and a lot of similar disable-some-hardware tips, which, unfortunately, did not help at all. I had almost given up on Windows 7 and re-installed XP, when I decided to try a BIOS-update as a last resort. After using MSI's rather comfortable LiveUpdate[3] the Windows 7 setup did work fine[4].
- [1]: MSDN-AA is one of the benefits of being a student
- [2]: http://images.google.de/images?q=Windows%207%20boot%20screen
- [3]: It's an Internet Explorer Active-X plug-in optimized for IE5 and 800x600, but other than that, it works pretty good. I can even update your BIOS from within the OS (does a hard reset after finishing, but that's probably the better alternative to shutting down on a possibly non-working BIOS)
- [4]: Sorry for the excessive usage of footnotes
