Windows 7 Win7 Clean Install will not proceed past 1st reboot

No problem am looking now..

Hi Trakkal
Your drivers for the storage manager are contained in the link I previously provided. Take a look at the screenshot. You'll see where I've highlighted the RAID/SATA drivers which will need to go onto either floppy, USB stick or disk.. Above them are the drivers you'll need to install once the os has loaded. Don't worry about the 'press F6 for install' as thats left over from XP and doesn't count in this instance...

I've presumed you wanted 32 bit drivers but if you need 64bit just change the search parameters although you may need to use vista 64bit

Thanks again kemical - that looks more promising. When I first went to that download site I didn't look past the heading "32-bit Floppy Configuration Utility", and that didn't seem to be about drivers. Sorry about that.

I'll let you know how it goes.

good luck...

Well, there's bad news and good news. The bad news is that fiddling with that rather user-unfriendly driver package download achieved nothing. Having loaded the apparently appropriate drivers, the install still hung at "Press any key ........".

The good news is that when I made Win 7 Install do a format of the selected partition (an option which should be more obvious during the install process, in my opinion) the install proceeded without any problems. I have no idea why this made a difference. I had previously "Custom" installed over a working XP partition, and on a clean re-formatted partition (using Acronis Disk Director). I had assumed that the Install would automatically format an active partition (unless you were doing an upgrade), or at least make it obvious that a format was needed - as did previous versions of Windows. Apparently this is not so.

However, all's well that ends well.

Pheeewwww......So it's at least installed...
Thanks for the update.

Were the partitions previously FAT32?

No. They were always NTFS. However, I seem to remember from some time ago that formatting with Acronis Disk Director is not always compatible with Windows. It's a pity the Win7 Install doesn't make the Format option a bit more visible.