Windows 7 Installation continually fails

A friend of mine runs a couple of yearly conferences here in our little Hick Town near the top of New Zealand, and every year people come from all around the country and I’m told people even come over from Australia to attend them. The most recent conference a couple of weeks ago was apparently a huge success, funded by New Zealand Telecom and by invitation only, mostly for internal Telecom “higher-ups” and people that Telecom do or want to do business with. A guy from Microsoft NZ turned up with a boat load of Windows 7 90 day trial DVDs, the trouble was, as you’d expect, no one wanted them, so just about every DVD the guy brought was binned at the end of the conference, with the exception of 7 that I picked up in order to test out. Now you might think someone who’s an open source programmer, doesn’t run Windows at all on his machines and spends most of his life barking on blogs about all things Open, wouldn’t want 7 Windows 7 discs to try out. The thing is I used to be a Windows engineer in my darker days, when I first started out in IT I was for all intensive purposes an IT engineer who only really dealt with Windows, second of all I wanted to be able to post a blog entry about how bad it was (Assuming of course it was bad).

The problems began with not being able to run it in a Virtual Machine because my current processor (AMD Athlon64 4000+ Socket 939) doesn’t have the AMD-V extension necessary to run 64bit Guests on a 32bit Host, this annoyed me somewhat but I attempted to carry on by unplugging the majority of my disks and plugging in an empty 200GB Sata Drive. I tried to install Windows 7 4 times, each attempt resulted in a failure, either the system would crash completely, or it would simply freeze and refuse to go any further, with the Vista-ish spinny wheel spinning still.

Before we jump to any major conclusions here, I should point out that I then decided to try and test the 64bit Beta of Kubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) on the same disk, and each of those installations failed too, now I know my processor is old, it’s getting replaced soon and it was one of the first 64bit processors out there, so perhaps neither of these OS’s is possible on my current processor, I just don’t know, I have previously run Debian Lenny 64bit on it however so what could be SO different about these installations.

One thing I can say about the installations, is that the Kubuntu installation took (As always) around 20 minutes, I could run it while running a live CD session (Which interestingly enough DID boot and work) and it only seemed to fail right near the end and on one occasion not until I actually rebooted after the installation, it simply failed to boot, the Windows 7 installation on the other hand, took 45 minutes each time before failing and from previous experience with Windows installs, the process it was going through at that time, was a good 20 minutes or so away from completion.

I will be upgrading my machine this coming week and you can rest assured I will be re-installing my main hard drive with the 64bit version of Kubuntu Karmic Koala (hopefully the full release version not the Beta) and I will once again attempt to install the 64bit Trial DVD of Windows 7 in both a VM and on a proper HDD. I’ll be sure to write blog posts about both, either here or on my ProdigalProgramming site, most likely spread across the two. I’ll try to include screenshots where I can and both reviews will be as honest and un-biased as I can possibly muster, I know several people who currently use Windows 7 and insist it’s actually quite good, I’m finding it hard from what I’ve seen so far to see much difference in it from Vista, both in looks and functionality but reliability as well.

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