Windows Vista or Server 2008 hangs at “completing installation…”

For a few hours a day now (mostly somewhere between 22h-01h), I was trying to use my newly self-puzzled PC with AMD AM2 technology and 8Gb ram (MSI K9N Neo-F V3 for the freaks) as a Windows 2008 Server. However, whatever I did, the setup routine always got stuck at the final phase “completing installation”, being, my pc that hangs and freezes completely.

The strange thing was the hard disk and partitions were detected, installation runs fine completely, than a reboot, than the setup continues, where it freezes at the final stage.

At first, I thought it was a bad DVD-kit, so burned me a new copy; then replaced almost all components like memory modules, HDD, DVD-ROM,… no help thought. I tried with Vista, Windows 7, Windows 2008, both 32 and 64 bits edition, no results.

At last, I tried an Ubuntu Linux installation, just to discover everything worked fine. So – NO hardware issue !! Must be a driver thing than.

Finally today, after a lot of googling and searching around, I found the solution, when looking for a way to “upload” drivers in some sort of slipstreamed Windows 2008 setup DVD. However, my solution was not a slipstreamed driver update, but a manual one:

a) when the Setup routine starts, make the appropriate selections on Windows ServerEdition to be installed, accept EULA,…

b) on the screen where the hard disk and/or partitions are shown, you can open up a CMD-BOX, by using SHIFT-F10

c) browse to your cd or usb-stick where all relevant drivers are present

d) push the correct drivers into the running preload Windows environment, by using the DRVLOAD command µ

“DRVLOAD <path to the inf-file>” (eg. drvload realtek1500cu.inf)

e) it should prompt you with a message “successfully uploaded inf-file”

f) repeat this for all known hardware components on the mainboard (I uploaded RAID/IDE controller drivers again, network card driver, soundcard driver,…)

g) continue the Windows 2008 setup in the other screen

h) setup will continue, server will initiate reboot, and setup will continue and finalize completely this time !!

For your reference, below link guided me to this solution:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistadeployment/thread/ab30e126-db1f-4c92-8bde-862af51eb9f2

Thanks again for reading, see you in some next posts. As my hardware is running fine now, I can finally go and experiment (AND BLOG !!) on Microsoft TMG, the next version of ISA Server…

Stay tuned,

/Peter