Windows 7 Ultimate Custom Install on Area 51

Finally, it's time to erase the preview edition of Windows 7 and install the real deal onto Area 51, the Quad Core box with two SLI nVidia cards, Windows 7 Ultimate has been sitting in the box for months now. The preview edition expired long ago, but booted up for 2 or more hours at a time. But, we are having some boot up problems, and I've been working to elimainate potential issues for some time.

The boot issue is this: often, the BIOS phase of the bootup is very slow, and it may take several minutes to reach the GRUB menu, if it appears at all. The workaround has been to boot off of an old Knoppix 5 CD, but I suspect my 7-year old cracked it and we can't use that disk anymore. We've had mixed results with an Ubuntu CD and Spinrite.

I ran Spinrite and did an exhaustive (level 4) check on the 200 GB C: drive partition (IDE HD) and it was fine. I was not able to finish the testing on the internal SATA drive, as it is 2 TB and the test would take forever.

I suspect the problem is either a bad SATA cable, a loose connection, or some problem with the SATA drive. Whatever the issue, I've disconnected the SATA cable from the drive, and the boot problems have vanished.

So, I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) after formatting the C: drive (an NTFS volume). The new install recognizes all 8 GB, which means the 64 bits are all working away at managing my RAM.

Performing the initial installation from the DVD was fast and easy, about 10 minutes, but then it's time to wait while all of the other updates install. The end results: Windows 7 Ultimate, basic installation, requires 25.6 GB of hard disk space and uses about 1.37 GB of RAM. Wow.