New Build Possible Disaster - Help!

[Davidh373]

Maybe I'm just incompetent - I appreciate everyone not being totally bored with this thread.

Nah, we're here to help. I'm also surprised a drive needs to be attached for it to post. Of course I've never been through a build that hasn't had at least something else attached.

 

[ArtShapiro]

Unfortunately, two attempts to install Win7 x64 Ultimate have failed due to "missing or corrupted files" one time, and "you need additional drivers" or words to that effect the second time. I don't know if the new slim drive is bad, the DVD has gone bad (it was used to build the H61 system a few weeks ago), or something really sinister is going on.

I ran a memory test without incident, and did a format of the main partition, taking about 20 seconds for 128 gigs. There's a tiny 120 meg partition marked as "system", and the remainder, partition 1, is shown as an active partition.

I've decided to not worry about it tonight. Enough is enough.

Art

 

[mfenn]

Man, what terrible things have you done in your life to get this much bad karma?

A few things I would check:
- Burn some new media
- Try a different optical drive (jury rig a standard-sized one or something)
- Make sure the SATA controller is set to AHCI mode

 

[ArtShapiro]

Man, what terrible things have you done in your life to get this much bad karma?

I have enough time in the industry to take most adversity appropriately: cussing like a drunken sailor. I've been through worse!

I decided to try reburning the DVD, but (naturally) MSDN seems to be offline for downloads today. The only other DVD I had at home was a 32 bit Win 7 Home Premium; I figured that this would perhaps tell me whether or not the drive was faulty, while realizing that it was an unacceptable solution due to memory limitations, as I'd shelled out for 8 gigs of premium CAS 7 memory.

It installed fine! Windows boots up in eight seconds, and shuts down in 3. Guess it's the SATA 3 SSD!

So I seem to have three choices right now:

• burn another DVD when MSDN comes back online
• Clean the existing DVD and treat it with some of my audiophile elixirs and try again
• Try a Windows Home Server restore of the H61 installation, which also was Win 7 x64 ultimate although with an Asus board.

I'm getting more and more confident that this machine is OK and a screaming little devil.

Art

 

[mfenn]

Sounds good! Hopefully you can chalk it up to a bad disk then.

 

[ArtShapiro]

I cleaned and surface-treated the DVD. Windows installed fine this time.

Drivers were installed from the Intel CD that came with the motherboard, and I have no yellow exclamation points in Device Manager. I haven't yet run a hundred foot network cable from my router across the house to where I'm working on this machine in the dining room, but am reasonably sure I'll get network connectivity.

The only really weird thing right now: I had run the Windows Experience Index on the temporary 32 bit installation with no special drivers, getting the max-possible 7.9 for that Sata 3 SSD. On this installation, with the drivers installed, it's only 5.9. We'll see what happens when I connect the network and can download scads of updates.

Art

 

[mfenn]

WEI is a pretty bad benchmark, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. It could be that some background process was running during the test that screwed up the numbers. Download CrystalDiskMark and see what that shows.