Win7 Installation blues

[Voicy]

Hi team!

So I decided to install Win7 RC1 last night...

Problem is, I started at 7pm and by 1am it still wasn't finished so I went to bed...

This morning when I woke up it eventually asked me for a username.

Now I'm no dairy farmer, but I'm sure it shouldn't take THIS long to install Win7.

My PC Specs are:

E7400 intel CPU
4GB 800mhz Ram
SATA DVD drive

onto a BRAND NEW 320GB SATA Seagate 7200rpm drive.

Any idea where the problem might be? Or is it pretty obvious that the drive might be a dud?

[_Caboose_]

I installed Windows 7 yesterday as a testing purpose for work.

Installation took about 20 mins but on a VM enviroment it took like 5.

Are you trying to dual boot or what?

[Voicy]

I installed Windows 7 yesterday as a testing purpose for work.

Installation took about 20 mins but on a VM enviroment it took like 5.

Are you trying to dual boot or what?

Well ultimately yes.

I left my XP drive in the pc so that win7 would pick it up as a system disk to cater for in the bootini type file.

The win7 installation is done on a complete separate drive.

One thing I did notice, Win7's partitioning tool isn't so kief, and after creating a partition - there was no mention of formatting it - let alone which file system to use.

When it prompts me for a user name/ password/serial / etc, the screens are VERY slow i.e. when you click next.

[_Caboose_]

I was also searching for dual booting but opted to go for a clean installation, all the "guides" i found was using 1 hd 2 partitions maybe it cant work on 2 hd's yet?

[Voicy]

Yeah I saw exactly the same thing...

I guess I'll then just have to make my XP drive the 1st boot choice and edit XP's boot.ini to read the Win7 drive as a boot option.

K, so tonight I'm scrapping everything, unplugging the XP drive, repartitioning+formatting the drive using the XP cd tool instead...then hoping for the best.

[Keldarza]

Did you format the NEW Hdd before using it? Windows 7 Might have done a full format of it if it detected it hasnt been formatted yet?

[Voicy]

Did you format the NEW Hdd before using it? Windows 7 Might have done a full format of it if it detected it hasnt been formatted yet?

I did indeed not do so. Although the Win7 partition is only 50GB big...even after it was done, it's ridiculously slow.

[Oculate]

When I installed RC1, I made a partition dedicated for Win7 beta. Formatted the partition while in XP, mounted the RC1 image and told it to install to the beta drive...

45min later, I was up and running

[Voicy]

When I installed RC1, I made a partition dedicated for Win7 beta. Formatted the partition while in XP, mounted the RC1 image and told it to install to the beta drive...

45min later, I was up and running

While running XP ?

[Keldarza]

I find a full format can be painfully slow. I had the beta [forget which one] and there was a huge delay before I got the screens to set up, kinda just waited on the background image for a long time, at least 10mins [i went away and came back]

You never know with the RCs and Betas, they might enforce the slower format for testing reasons? Although, I tend to find Virtual machine installs of it faster than real PC installs...