Windows 7 Upgrade Problem

Hi folks,

I am writing this for my son, who away at college and trying to troubleshoot his computer with me over the phone. He has a machine that had Vista on it and was running fine. He decided to put Windows 7 on it as an upgrade (seems to have been a mistake). The upgrade did not go well.

Basically, he can get the computer to run normally. After the upgrade, he can surf the web and do all the normal things. When he powers down and powers back up he gets a BSOD (he still has to get me the error code -- I will tell him how to prevent the machine from immediately trying to do a restart -- he is coming home from work shortly). He is able to bring the computer up in Safe Mode.

Any suggestions on how I should proceed to troubleshoot this problem? The computer was working great before.

Ziggle

 

We could use the BSOD code to gve you a more accurate picture of what is occurring.

Did your son report any problems with Vista before upgrading?

 

Does he have a full version of Windows 7? A clean install of Win 7 instead of an upgrade on top of Vista may have been more successful.

Does his computer have Vista on a Recovery partition in case he needs to go back to Vista? If it has a Recovery partition, has he burned a DVD disc from it so that he can install Vista from a DVD instead of the Recovery partition?

 

Hi folks,

Much more information today.We did a clean install (i.e. reformated the hard drive and reinstalled Vista). He still gets the BSOD. The error code is 0x00000116 and it reports an issue with atikmdag.sys. He does have an ATI 8450x2 graphics card in the system. The hardware manager did report an issue (yellow question mark displayed), so we installed a new driver. No effect on the problem. He still can come up in safe mode, but he cannot power down the system and come up without a BSOD.

I had him try to install Vista SP2 to see if that would help and during the install windows report "installation failed."

Any thoughts?

Zig

 

We could use the BSOD code to gve you a more accurate picture of what is occurring.

As in the text that is on the screen. A digital camera photo would work just as well.

 

Hi folks,

usafveteran asked if it was a new Windows 7 install. It was an upgrade. This is why we are trying to get Vista back on the system.

Zig

 

Does his computer have a Recovery partition, as most computers have now when they are new. The purpose of the Recovery partition is to allow the user to reinstall Windows and all the software that was on the computer when new. Typically, the Recovery partition will appear as drive D in Computer.

What make and model computer is this?

 

I am afraid this was a homemade computer and no backup partition was created (I will do that in the future now that I think about it).

My son and I put this together as a game machine. He uses it for his college homework as well.

Zig

 

How did Vista originally get installed on it? Do you have a Vista installation disk?

I believe you can not get back to Vista without having a Vista installation disk. Read Scenario 3 at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971762

 

We have the original Vista disk and have re-installed with the original Vista disk. The system installed fine when we built the machine a year ago. Vista appears to have installed, but we cannot install SP2 so something is different.

Zig