Tricky Windows 7 installation on old machine

Silver47 · March 1, 2016

Hey guys,

I want to revive a fairly old pc. Specs are:

Asus Vintage barebone case

AMD Athlon 64 x2 4200+

Some Asus socket 940 am2 mainboard (maybe an amd 690g chipset? - was sold by asus as a barebone system back then and has no model name or number on it)

4gb (2x2gb) of Kingston 600mhz ddr2 ram

Some Asus branded psu with 350w

80gb WD branded hdd

evga geforce 9400 gt 512mb

ide type dvd rw cd drive

I wanted to install Windows 7 on this machine but when I tried to boot from a boot disk the screen just went black. Black not like in no monitor input but as in just nothing happening. cd drive led was working. So I waited, but as nothing had happened after 5 minutes I shut the system down. By repeating it I run into the same situation over and over again. How can I make this work?

What I tried so far:

Checking the hardware (cpu, ram, hdd and gpu were tested in other systems)

Manually selecting the cd drive as the boot source

Checking the BIOS settings - everything seems to be all right, but I dont know my way around ide devices and their configuration...

DaltonM · March 1, 2016

Have you tried installing Vista or XP and upgrading from there?

Silver47 · March 1, 2016

First of all; thank you for replying so quickly.

No, I have not... I know this would most likely be the easiest way, but the only drive I had windows xp running on broke just recently... Would you recommend installing windows xp and then upgrading to 7? Also do you happen to know if I somehow can install an os from an usb stick on such an old machine? and if so, how do i select it as a boot device? Old hardware seems much more complicated compared to what we have now.

alex_read · March 2, 2016

If it was a problem with the old specs not being powerful or an issue with the install process, you'd get a visible error - this could be more of an issue reading the drive or a hardware fault. Do you get past the POST, can you get into the BIOS? Have you got any OS on that computer that you're able to boot into and see at the moment? If you've answered yes to both of them, maybe look to see your installation media isn't corrupted (download again from a different source or clean the CD of scratches) and consider copying all the install files to the local drive rather than booting from the CD - all these might help perhaps

Silver47 · March 2, 2016

2 hours ago, alex_read said:

Do you get past the POST, can you get into the BIOS?

Yep, works fins. No error codes at POST and I allready checked the BIOS settings. I even got to ther point where I can manually select a boot medium (by pressing f8 on Asus MBs)

2 hours ago, alex_read said:

Have you got any OS on that computer that you're able to boot into and see at the moment?

Unfortunately not... Like I said, the HDD gave up but I had another old drive laying around.

3 hours ago, alex_read said:

If you've answered yes to both of them, maybe look to see your installation media isn't corrupted (download again from a different source or clean the CD of scratches) and consider copying all the install files to the local drive rather than booting from the CD - all these might help perhaps

My bootdrive should be working fine, just recently I used it for a clean install on a laptop.

Next I'm going to insert the hdd in another system and try installing Windows 7 on it. Maybe it'll work out somehow with another pc...

Thanks guys, I really appreciate the help