Recently, a fresh Windows install was due on my home PC primarly used by my parents and my family after my switch to a MacBook about a year ago.

However, whenever I tried to start the installation routine, the setup would boot into the “Windows is starting”-screen with the nicely animated glowing 7-logo, but stay there indefinitely without an error message. When starting the setup in safe mode, the setup would just hang after

Loaded: \Windows\system32\drivers\disk.sys

I started searching the internet for similar problems and found a couple of recommendations related to nForce chipsets. Some told you to disable your on-board LAN ports (which I’m not using anyway) and a lot of similar disable-some-hardware tips, which, unfortunately, did not help at all. I had almost given up on Windows 7 and re-installed XP, when I decided to try a BIOS-update as a last resort. After using MSI’s rather comfortable LiveUpdate – an Internet Explorer Active-X plugin optimized for IE5 and 800x600 which works surprisingly well – the Windows 7 setup did work fine. It felt a little weird when the BIOS update utility ran within Windows and does a hard-reset after updating the BIOS, but that’s probably better than rebooting with a possibly non-working BIOS.