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Installed Win 7 on my new setup on friday, its been a year or so since i last installed windows, and a few things caught me out this time around:
Everything was going well with the new install and frequent images were being made with Acronis, but the boot config in the mobo looked wierd.
Foolishly, i didn't unplug all my HDDs before installation to the SSD, so Windows decided to put the boot manager on a partition on my slowest HDD. Whenever i tried to disable that HDD from booting, Windows would throw a hissy fit.
I played with BCDEdit and tried to move the bootmgr, but that broke secure booting from the mobo, i tried to fix that with different settings and thought i had it working, until i tried to restore an image.
To cut a long story short, i got tired of messing, formatted the SSD, UNPLUGGED the other drives and reinstalled Windows last night. Everything is finally working as it should.
The second issue was getting Windows to update. I left it for hours while it was checking for updates, but it never seemed to update, which was obviously weird as there are hundreds of updates that need applying to Win7 SP1 in order to get it to a current standard. I played around with various manual update tips, until i found a tool called WSUS, which is a standalone offline update utility. I think it can be used to build a slipstreamed installation media too, but haven't got the time to play with that. Give it a go if Windows Update seems to be stalling for you.
Lastly, when performing a fresh install of Windows, i make sure all my system drivers are current, and put them in numbered folders so i can go through and install them one by one. Usually starting with chipset drivers, the GPU, the USB, Audio, LAN and finally Printer. However, it would appear that many driver installers require DotNetFX 4.0 to install properly these days, which meant many of the driver installations would not complete, or would hang. So my new method includes installing DotNet before any of the system drivers. Keeping a local offline DotNet installer seems like a good idea these days.
It only used to take a few hours to reinstall Windows, update it, install all my apps and be good to go. So far i've wasted three days on it. Where is Win 7 SP2 Microsoft?!
So, if you're reinstalling windows any time soon, make sure only your OS drive is plugged in, make sure you have dotnet for driver installations, and have a look at WSUS or similar for getting windows to update.
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