You know I'm at whit's end to be posting this type of question here.
A buddies HP Mini 210-1010NR machine's hard drive died. Being the tech guy, it became my responsibility to 'fix it'. I bought a new sata drive and threw that in. I went to HP's website, went to the support section for HP Mini 210-1010NR and ordered the appropriate official Windows 7 Starter 2 DVD rom Recovery Media discs. Even got a USB DVD rom drive to go with it.
Booted off the DVD roms, formatted and restored / reinstalled a fresh clean legit installed windows 7. After the thing reboots a few times (due to the installation and configuration of windows) it finally gets to this screen which reads: "Setup is preparing computer for first use" and sits there for Hours.
I did the usual Googling and the only thing people have to say is boot into Advance Recovery Mode and select the Low Graphics VGA option because Win7 doesn't detect your video driver. In disbelief I tried it anyway because obviously, these are the official recovery dvds and should have the necessary drivers. Of course it still sits at "Setup is preparing computer for first use" for hours.
I tried with the external DVD drive unplugged and without any SD cards inserted or any other device. No cheese. Tried restarting and attempting again -- no cheese. I cannot boot into any of the available safe modes because it says something to the effect of "You need to finish preparing or booting your computer before using it in safe mode" before exiting back to boot loop.
Tried doing the whole installation again fresh. I'm sure you can guess how well that ended up.
The system had win7 starter originally, so it should be fully able to support it. The RAM all tests out no errors and the hard drive has no defects or bad sectors either. Why is HP trying to kill me young?
