Can boot fine from HDD, but booting from a windows 7 disc freezes halfway?!

[OJay]

Hey guys. Just trying to format my brother's system and I'm getting some confusing results here. Let me give you a little background before I proceed:

I disassemble my bro's system to clean it and put it back together. At first there are problems booting from HDD but then it boots fine. I deicde to format it so I plug in a windows 7 DVD and try to boot from there. Sometimes it gives me an error screen saying:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change caused this.

File: \Windows\System32\winload.exe
Status: 0xc000000e
Info: Selected entry could not be loaded.

But it sometimes does not show this error and boots fine and right after the 'starting windows' screen the display just turns into glittery gray and gradually keeps getting darker till it becomes black (I know cus I waited once hoping it will wake up somehow). It doesn't get past this. I tried booting from a USB stick with the same windows 7 and same thing. I used another windows and created another bootable USB and same. Disassembled the entire system and put it back together and no go. Tried using only one RAM module, 2 RAM module swapped slots, one RAM module in each possible slot, the other RAM module in each possible slot. All no go. BIOS settings stock and CMOS cleared in all cases. System specs below:

E8400 C2D
MSI X48C Platinum
2x2GB DDR3-1333 Kingston KVR
ATI Radeon 4870 512 MB
LG DVD ROM
WD 80 GB 7200 rpm
Gigabyte ODIN 800W PSU

???

 

[Steltek]

This sounds like a power problem to me. I'd check all the power plugs to make sure that everything is snugged down tightly. If they are, then my next step would be to swap out the power supply.

 

[OJay]

I also removed my HDD and used a Seagate Barracuda HDD (data HDD, no OS) and tried to format that but same. So it indicates this is irrelevant to the HDD.

 

[OJay]

I don't see the relation to the PSU? I did mention the system boots fine from the HDD into windows 7. It's the bootable windows 7 set up process that's giving me this headache. How can this be the PSU?

 

[Steltek]

I don't see the relation to the PSU? I did mention the system boots fine from the HDD into windows 7. It's the bootable windows 7 set up process that's giving me this headache. How can this be the PSU?

Well, you said initially you had problems booting from the hard drive. Just because you didn't have to do anything to resolve this doesn't mean that there isn't a problem. The power supply is a direct common link between the hard drive, the DVD drive, and the video card.

 

[Bubbaleone]

You say you can boot into Windows? If so, boot Windows and open Disk Management and/or Windows Explorer. See if your optical drive is correctly detected.

If it is, see what happens when you try to load the install DVD. If the drive's detected in Windows and you can see the DVD contents in Explorer but it won't load from a reboot, then you probably have bad media.

 

[OJay]

bubbleone,

i booted from my HDD, checked both my media (the DVDROM and the USB) and they're both detected. I tried to repair install win 7 from my DVD ROM and it gave me an error message saying I need to se the flag to 9 or something along that (I do not remember it). I tried running the win7 setup off the USB (which has another version of win7) and it repaired fine creating a windows.old folder. I tried restarting and booting from the flash drive win7 or the DVD ROM win7 now that I repaired my system and im getting the same glittery screen.

 

[Bubbaleone]

Have you got another PC you could swap that 4870 into to be sure it hasn't gone south? Same for your monitor.

 

[OJay]

Why would somethign be wrong with the monitor or the card when they can boot into the HDD just fine?

 

[OJay]

I swapped in a brand new 6950 into the system, same. Don't have a monitor at the moment but I highly doubt it has anything to do with this.

 

[Bubbaleone]

Why would somethign be wrong with the monitor or the card when they can boot into the HDD just fine?

It wasn't clear that you're talking about just the DVD, and that the card and monitor operate normally when booting from the HDD

....But it sometimes does not show this error and boots fine and right after the 'starting windows' screen the display just turns into glittery gray and gradually keeps getting darker till it becomes black (I know cus I waited once hoping it will wake up somehow). It doesn't get past this.....

Did you test the DVD itself, in a different machine, to eliminate the possibility of having a bad DVD?

 

[OJay]

I used that same DVD to format my own PC. I created a new DVD and used a bootable windows7 USB all of which gave me the same result.

Update: I took the HDD and formatted it with a clean install of win7 by hooking it to my own PC. After the install it booted innto the HDD fine so I took it out back into my brother's system and now it is giving me a 'missing BOOTMGR' message. DVD booting from there still gives me the same glittery screen. Please help,.

 

[corkyg]

Replace the optical drive.

 

[Matt1970]

It's more than likely either the optical drive, or a bad hard drive. Windows setup does need to scan the drive before it can get to the main screen. If it can't read the media (dirty scratched DVD or bad DVD Drive) or can't read the hard drive propery it can hang for hours or give blue screens.

Download seatools for windows and see what it tells you after a scan.

 

[OJay]

Matt; I could format the HDD successfully on another system. Besides, I mentioned that the PC booted FINE from the HDD, but not from any external media!
Corky; I did use a bootable USB though, which gave me the exact same bug :S...