windows 7 will not install

Sorry if this is long winded, but I thought it best to explain everything at the start. The hard drive I had windows 7 installed on 'died' for want of a better expression. I will mention here that I also had a new battery put into the pc at this time. The pc froze at one time at the POST screen while trying to fix it at the start and I was told that the battery might need taking out and left for a time. This I did and then replaced it. But that didn't help. I took the pc to a shop to see if they could help, but they couldn't and I asked them to replace the battery with a new one. So I went to install the same windows 7 ultimate disc on another drive. This drive had been used for storing data on but had never had an OS on it. This is an 80gb sata drive. Having disconnected all my other hard drives I formatted the sata drive and proceeded to install windows. All seemed to go well until the end when the pc restarted after updating the registry. All I have is a black screen with a cursor flashing. There are no messages to say anything is wrong. I left it alone for a while to see if anything further happened, but nothing did. I installed windows xp on the sata drive (no problems) and went looking for answers. I thought first that when the cursor flashed that perhaps the boot manager was missing, although there was nothing to say so. Having found what to do in that case, I installed windows 7 again, after formatting the drive, of course. When the cursor came up, I restarted the computer at the power button and went to the repair option on the dvd. I entered whatever at the command prompt and a response came up that it had been applied. But, when the pc restarted, the cursor was back…. When I restarted the pc again at the power button a message came up that the 'installation had been interrupted and the installation was unsuccessful. Please restart the pc and restart the installation' This went on for about 10 days or so. I then thought the files on the windows 7 disc had somehow become corrupted and so I went looking for another windows 7 disc. Eventually found one on the internet. Started again to install on the sata drive, this time without formatting the disc. Same thing happened, again. Only now, because there was an OS to start with, the whole install was rolled back to xp and a message at the end that the windows 7 install was unsuccessful. Three weeks and a few hairs shorter later, I am completely at a loss as to why this won't install. The first install in 2010 flew through with no hesitation at all and worked great until 3 weeks ago. I would be grateful for any help anyone can offer. Thanks for reading and in advance for any help offered. hedley

Start over again doing what you did the first time with one addition.
After you disconnect all other drives, use DBAN to wipe the drive. It's a .iso file you use to create a bootable CD from. Boot it and take all the defaults, no need to change anything during boot. When allowed, enter autonuke and press Enter. Give it a few minutes so it wipes the first part of the drive which included the MBR and partition table, making it into a raw. unallocated, unformatted drive.

Remove the DBAN disc and insert your Win 7 install DVD and do a normal install.

See if that makes any difference.

Hi Ztrucker, thanks for the reply. Burned the file to disc, but on booting this came up: EDD: Error 2000 reading sector 5253 EDD: Error 2000 reading sector 3255 No Default Or UI configuration directive found. I burned the file using imgburn at 3x speed. Download was 223 kb and disc gives 10.5mb files on disc. I ran the disc twice, but got the same both times. Would this be a fault of the file itself or the programme I used to burn to the file? I'm grateful again for your insight. hedley

The downloaded .iso should be (from a Command Prompt dir command) 02/25/2013 06:38 PM 11,077,632 dban-2.2.7_i586.iso

Hi Ztruker, thanks for the reply. Got another download for dban and got it burned ok. Unfortunately, it didn't solve my problem. I let it run for 11/2 on the drive, but I still had to format the drive before trying to install again. Using a different drive again this time. As I had to reinstall xp again to come back here, I left it to install unattended and came back to find an error message on the screen that there was an 'error loading the os'. When I went to reinstall it again I noticed that windows had put 2 partitions on the drive. C: Partition had 100mb and D: Partition had 117929mb. As windows won't install on the D: drive, I take it that was the error. When I deleted these partitions and got it back to just C: partition again, xp installed fine. Working on that premise, I tried to install windows 7 again. Got the same result. Just a flashing cursor. I'm wondering now if the same thing is happening when windows 7 is installing only I'm not getting an error message at the end, just the cursor. When I tried to reinstall again, sure enough there were 2 partitions. In windows 7 they showed as drive 0 Partition 1, 100mb and Partition 2, 117929mb, so partition 2 seemed to be where windows 7 had tried to install. When I went to install windows xp after that, the 2 partitions showed up as Partition C: 100mb and Partition D: 117929 mb. I deleted to 2 partitions and came back to just the C: partition again. I think that is where my problem lies, but I don't know how to resolve it. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for the help. hedley

If you don't pre-partition a drive, Windows 7 will create the 100MB System Reserved partition and a normal C: boot partition. Do try deleting any/all partitions during Windows 7 install then create 1 single partition to install to. Don't let Windows 7 Installer setup the hard drive for you. \ See if that makes a difference. It shouldn't but it's worth a try.

Hi Ztrucker Yes, I deleted all partitions before installing and had a single partition to install to. Should windows not make partition 1 the biggest partition and install windows on that and then the boot partition as partition 2? To me, it seems windows tries to boot from partition 1 and is saying it tried to install windows to a 100 mb partition, which, of course, is impossible. Or is this not the case? Thanks for the help. hedley

windows 7 should create a 100mb partition first for bootloader then use rest of hard drive and create a 2nd partition to install to.

the first 100mb partition is system reserved, the 2nd partition will be the C partition.

now why it tried to install onto the first system reserved partition is a mystery to me unless you somehow told it that's where you wanted it to install.

this link may help you. :- http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/52291…-7-install.html

Mmmm i just want to say you here that you should make sure to your computer's specifications because windows 7 requires the heavy computer's specification for installation so you should make sure this first and then try again……….