Resolved Windows 7: Flashing cursor problem!

[i Smack]

Morning all,

I need help!


I have an late 2010 iMac 27" - i7 - and had been running Snow Leopard & Win7 successfully for over a year.

However, I had a clean out and formatted the hard drive to install SL (& Lion) with Windows 7. OS X installs fine, Boot Camp assistant runs fine, the windows install runs fine. However when it goes to reboot after the initial installation stage of windows, it either:

A. Boots to a black screen with flashing cursor in top left corner (where I then have to reboot and hold Option to select OS X.)

or

B. Boots into windows just fine, and then on next restart produces flashing cursor again (occasionally it has booted into Windows every time no problems, but when forcing it to boot OS X the Windows installation magically disappears from OS X's view - start up disk etc.)

I can't figure this out, I've tried reinstalling at least 10 times now. I've tried it from boot camp within Snow Leopard and Lion. I've tried different partition set ups. I've installed an SSD and tried on that - same story.

So I really am stuck, and really missing windows! (I need both lol)

Any help will be much appreciated


edit: As far as I'm aware I'm using a retail copy of Windows 7 professional - I tried to burn it previously using an official download from MSDN to a DVD+R but both copies I made failed halfway through installation (I burnt at lowest speed so gave up on that)

 

[i Smack]

*bump*

I'm really stuck here - are there some versions of Windows 7 that ask for the serial before installation? I've tried two different versions of Pro and then Ultimate, all have same problem as above.

 

[johnhurley]

*bump*

I'm really stuck here - are there some versions of Windows 7 that ask for the serial before installation? I've tried two different versions of Pro and then Ultimate, all have same problem as above.

Are you formatting the win 7 partition as NTFS?

You need to go into advanced options to force it to re-format ...

 

[i Smack]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Yeah, formatting everytime. Installer completes, goes to reboot and instead of booting up windows it presents me with the flashing cursor.

 

[musiclvr]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Yeah, formatting everytime. Installer completes, goes to reboot and instead of booting up windows it presents me with the flashing cursor.

I am having this exact same problem.

 

[johnhurley]

Yeah, formatting everytime. Installer completes, goes to reboot and instead of booting up windows it presents me with the flashing cursor.

So when you get the flashing cursor can you hold the option key down and get it into windows that way? If so then try that and finish the bootcamp setup by installing all the necessary windows drivers ...

 

[i Smack]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

The flashing cursor is when it tries to boot windows. I can hold alt prior to this and select the disk, but then it's the same problem isn't it.


The one or two times I actually managed to boot windows, I did install the boot camp drivers but it still stopped working on restart.black cursor again.

 

[i Smack]

Anybody know if installing via EFI mode would help? Ideally I wanted to split the 120gb SSD between OSX and Windows but its got to the point where im stuck. Could always install windows on SSD and OSX on the HDD?

 

[i Smack]

bump

do apple users generally leave problems unsolved? lol. Nowhere points to a solution for this, and well, its not like I can ask Jobs.

 

[johnhurley]

Nowhere points to a solution for this, and well, its not like I can ask Jobs.

Try taking it into the genius bar ...

 

[i Smack]

Try taking it into the genius bar ...

lol, may aswell throw it off a bridge...

 

[i Smack]

Well for anyone who's interested I've finally solved it.


SSD was in the second sata port (disk1) and apposed to first (disk0). Which is fine with OSX installed on the SSD but for some reason Windows doesnt like it. Perhaps this is only a problem with unofficial SSD upgrades.

Strangely enough, before I swapped ports, I could get Windows to load by trying to boot of the Windows installation DVD but not hitting any keys to boot from it, it would then go on to load Windows

 

[theKitch]

Well for anyone who's interested I've finally solved it.


SSD was in the second sata port (disk1) and apposed to first (disk0). Which is fine with OSX installed on the SSD but for some reason Windows doesnt like it. Perhaps this is only a problem with unofficial SSD upgrades.

Strangely enough, before I swapped ports, I could get Windows to load by trying to boot of the Windows installation DVD but not hitting any keys to boot from it, it would then go on to load Windows

Boom! Nailed it for me! I had my SSD (boot drive) in the DVD slot and my spinning data disk in the HD slot. I switched them so the SSD was in the designated HD slot and everything is working perfectly!!!