Screen blank after windows 7 installation loads

Lonelan

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Jun 26, 2010
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Yesterday the boot drive containing my windows 7 pro 64-bit OS fatal error'd and is now a paperweight. I bought a new 500gb WD drive, but the install process hangs after the windows 7 logo splash screen. All I get is a black screen with a moveable pointer. This happens both with a freshly burned bootable windows 7 pro dvd and the original windows 7 pro media.

The drive itself is a 16MB buffer instead of 32MB, but I don't think that should be an issue.

Is the hang happening with the system formatting the drive? Should I format it on another machine before trying to install? I don't think this is the case either since the drive shouldn't even be an issue yet.

The only time the machine has gone past this screen and allowed me to start installation, the "Configuring system" dialogue told me the hard drive request timed out.