Clean Win 7 Install BSOD Issues

Hey everyone,

I'm at my wits end with this. I've never had any issues installing an operating system in the past and I'm rather embarrassed it's happened to me with what should be such a simple installation. I have partitioned a 260 gig hard drive. I have windows xp up and running on the first partition and I am trying to install windows 7 on the second partition. My problem is that after I initiate the windows 7 setup, it copies the files over to the partition, expands and then restarts. It gets to the loading screen and then straight away I get the blue screen. The only thing on it is:

STOP: 0x0000005C (0x0000010B, 0x00000003, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

I've searched high and dry and some tend to think it's an outdated bios problem, which brings me to my next issue. My system is a HP Pavillion a1320a P4 2.93ghz duo with 2gig of ram, I went to the HP website and downloaded the bios update SP34920.exe and when I tried to execute it (using my admin account, also tried using "run as" and also safe mode) it goes through the motions, I click continue and then it tells me....

You must be logged in as Administrator to install this update. Update has been cancelled (9999).

Smooth sailing so far, eh? So anyway, I email HP tech support and they send me the standard text book response back. Clear temp files and try redownloading the file and install. That is supposed to magically work, well, it didn't.

I'm unsure whether I need the BIOS update to rectify my install problem. If I can't find any answers here, my next plan of attack will be to whack in a seperate hard drive and see if I can install it on that. Oh, and I ran the upgrade advisor and it tells me my system should be able to run windows 7 just fine (hah!) I'd really like to be able to keep XP, at least until I get 7 up and running, so completely reformatting and installing windows 7 really isn't a choice for me at the moment. Please if anyone can help let me know.

Cheers!

Trying installing with 4 gb memory. Win7 can install with 2 gb ram - but it may also run into problems (I have tried this myself).

A couple of points here.
Is it a retail purchase, or a download. If the latter, it could be burning problem or a bad download.

Fwiw. I googled before posting. Oddly, all the references I could find only related to Vista. Not much call for optimism though. I did not find a single solution. Lots of suggestions but no results.

My own suggestion. Make a folder on your XP partition, called Setup. Dump the entire DVD in there, and run setup from the folder.

Later. Just read the previous post. I think I was still posting at the time). I have two computers I regularly use for Windows 7 testing. Both have only 2Gbs of Ram. I have never experienced any install issues with any of the versions of Windows 7.

Thanks for the quick response both of you. I really doubt it's a RAM issue but as it stands my motherboard can only hold 2 gig max so that's a no go there. I've been googling high and dry about this particular issue and it seems to only be happening on HP machines. I really think it's the bios and I can't update it. If I could solve the bios update issue then maybe windows would install. Just as a side note though, when I get to the boot screen I have two choices, earier version of windows or setup, so I choose earlier versions and I have XP and Windows (default) choice. XP being my current OS so I am assuming win 7 is the other? When I choose the windows (default) it says hal.dll could not be found, but when I check the system32 folder on the win 7 installation it's there. So I don't know what the go is with that.

It's a downloaded version of win 7 but I hash checked it when it had finished and it passed the test, could it still be corrupt even though it passed hash checking?

Thanks again guys.

Bump.

The mobo is a ECS RC410-M /Asterope-GL8E. I'm guessing it was made specifically for HP/Compaq because ECS offers no support for that particular model on their website. I can't seem to find any bios available for that particular mobo except on the HP website. I extracted the BIOS exe that I downloaded from the HP website. Would I be able to flash it using a flash utility and the ROM in that extracted exe?