Windows 7 Windows 7 boots to desktop then freezes

[snorket]

Hello. I've just installed the windows 7 beta in a dual boot config with vista, and everything seemed to go smoothly until it loaded the desktop. The background with the fish loads up, then it just freezes. No icons, no taskbar - nothing but the fish swimming all alone. I'm running an MSI Neo3 and a dual core E8400 if that's any help.

Thanks in advance!

 

[montyuk]

can you load safe mode at all?

 

[Radenight]

Hello snorket and welcome to windows7forums!

An interesting problem you have here.. let's see if we can't figure this one out for ya.. So you did a clean install of Windows 7 Beta on your rig which already had Vista installed on it.. and all went fine until the first "real" load up of the deskop.. now all is freezing and all you can see if the fish background? I just want to make sure I got it straight...

What is your graphics card if ya don't mind my asking? Are you using an LCD display or CRT? If LCD do you have it running on the DVI port or VGA? I know some people have been having some problems with DVI.. some have had to swtich to VGA until they were able to get the proper video card drivers for their system then they were able to switch back to DVI and all worked fine.. maybe that's a good place to start since you said the install seemed to go fine.. OR perhaps it's another component causing the problem.. hmm.. you say you did a dual boot config, so did you install 7 on a seperate drive or on the same drive as Vista but on a seperate partition?

I'm not sure if there have been any problems with the MSI boards or not but I can do some searching around and see what I can find, I'll report back to ya if I find any common issues with those boards and Windows 7..

If you could answer those questions for me than I can get a better idea of what were dealing with here... I'll be awaiting your reply and hopefully if you haven't already, we can get this figured out for ya....

 

[snorket]

Radenight & Montyuk - Thanks for the replies.

I can boot to safe mode, no problem, but I guess I should have checked the device manager while I was there (d'oh!). I'll check it later when I get home later tonight.

My graphics card is a gigabyte ati HD4670, and its connected to my LCD via DVI. I'll try switching to VGA and see if that works. Could be the driver since I have a few problems with the graphics driver even in vista.

I installed Windows 7 on a separate HD from vista.

I forgot to mention something else which, hopefully, could give a clue as to what the problem is - When I press CTRL-ALT-DEL, my screen goes blank. The desktop comes back when I press ESC. I guess it could be a graphics driver issue. Any recommendations on which driver I should use?

 

[montyuk]

theres a preview driver available from ati which i used for my 4870 that hasnt give me any problems so far,
ATi Windows 7 Preview drivers. - Neowin Forums - links are in the first post.

might be worth downloading a copy of drive sweeper before you start, boot into safe mode,
uninstall driver and then run drive sweeper to clean out the gunk.
if you can, run the preview driver installer in safemode, otherwise try and boot into windows and see what happens.

 

[snorket]

I've solved my windows problem. You guys are going to have a good laugh about this

My pc is connected to my monitor via DVI, and via HDMI to my TV. Windows 7 apparently detected my TV as the main display instead of my monitor. WHen I booted up, my TV was off, so what I was looking at on my monitor was the extended desktop! That's why there were no icons, no taskbar and I couldn't see my mouse pointer.

Thanks for the help and tips, though.