Up to date bios version?
Are you doing a windows installation from the cd? How old is the cd? Any scratches? You may want to try a usb installation of windows
Yes, I'm doing installation from the CD. CD was received with computer on March 31. No scratches or extremely minor ones to the point where I looked at it and was like "yeah, it's fine" almost instantly. Keep in mind that this problem started occurring before I reformatted my hard drive. Windows had been operating fine since March.
My activity on the computer consisted of mostly music production and some gaming from March-June. From June until the problem (about 3 months?), I was using it almost extensively for mining and some school work. For a month of gaming, I was using an NVidia 9600 or something and was getting crap m/hash, but I wanted to stay involved. So, I bought a 6970 because I knew I could use it for gaming later on and it also had nice resale value.
When I bought the 6970, I upped my psu from a 450 watt to a 750. I noticed after a while of mining, my computer would randomly shut off and restart approximately once every 2 days or so. I experimented with my mining settings, and although I might not have had enough time to establish a good correlation, I think keeping less work-intensive mining settings resulted in fewer random restarts. So, this means Windows (or something) was already weird to begin with. Then again, I don't know much about computers at all, so maybe they were power surges from an overworked psu or something.
Then, Windows stopped booting altogether. The computer restarted, but this time it failed and from then on wouldn't start again. This was when I had all my data on my hard drive. It was only after I had already tried all the different hardware, BIOS, software, and repair options I could think of that I decided to reformat the hard drive. I assumed at this point that my copy of Windows had gotten totally fucked up somehow, possibly by a hacker or trojan. Ironically, this was all right after I downloaded Geist Geld (45 GG gone forever), though the restarting pattern began before I downloaded it.
So, I bought a USB/sata cable, transfered my data, files, wallet.dat, and whatever other crap I needed to a laptop. I transferred the data successfully, so I knew at that point the hard drive was semi-functional at least. I reformatted my hard drive, tried reloading windows, and now we arrive at the current state -- Windows extracts but doesn't complete installation setup.
And, about the up-to-date BIOS settings, no idea.
