Windows 7 Windows 7 Installation Slow or Stops at "Completing Installation" stage

tomb75

New Member
Hi,

I'm doing a fresh clean install of windows 7 home premium 32 bit off a retail DVD.

Computer is an HP Pavilion dv3114tx with 2 Gigs of RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce 8400 graphics card.

Doing a fresh install onto a newly formatted partition of the hard drive.

The installation gets past the first reboot to the point where it says "Completing Installation..."

The 3 dots keep moving and I can move the mouse around the screen but it's been at this stage for over an hour now. Is this normal or is there a problem?

Would it be anything to do with the NVIDIA GeForce chipset? If so, and I cannot switch off the graphics card in BIOS (I can't) does this effectively mean I cannot install Windows 7 on this machine?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Tom
 
No, I formatted it by pressing shift F10 and from the command line typing:

format C: /q

to quick format the C: partition where the installation is.

By the way, I went out and left the computer for about 4 hrs and I have now got to a slick looking screen saying "Setup is preparing your computer for first use". This is the furthest into the installation process that I've got thus far so maybe something is about to happen :eek:
 
The drive has 2 partitions, the first is about 200 GB in size (which is where I am installing Windows) and the second is about 10 GB in size (and used to contain the HP recovery files).
 
BTW the screen has now gone black but the machine is still switched on... Been like that for about 10 mins - no, sorry, my fault, it was just the screen saver
 
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I don't understand how you could format the C: drive when there was an active OS on it.

You typically get an error message.

Did it say something like format complete and if you formated the C: drive that should have wiped out the factory partition as well.

I'm confused:confused:
 
No, there was no OS on it. I was formatting from the command prompt from the boot manager launched from the windows 7 dvd... i'm not sure what it's technical name is - the command prompt that pops up when you do shift F10... you can format the whole disk because you're not using any of the files on the hard disk... am i making sense?
 
How could there no have been an operating system on it when you have a factory partition.

What happened to the HP operating system?

First you stated you formatted by using format C: /q from the command prompt.

Now you're saying you formatted It during the installation.

Yes, you better believe I am confused.
 
Well, yes, there WAS an operating system on the machine before, but I wanted to do a clean install with Win 7 so I got rid of the previous OS by formatting the drive (there was a corrupted system file in my previous Vista installation which could not be repaired, due to a dodgy Seagate external drive).

Now the original thread is perhaps slightly out of date as installation appears to have moved on to the "Setup is preparing your computer for first use" stage. This is also taking AGES - definitely more than an hour on this screen. Installation has now taken 5 hours or so. Is this normal?
 
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