Windows 7 Setup Hung? Here’s a Tip
If your Windows 7 Setup is hung or taking a long time at the “Transferring files, settings, and programs” step and you’re wondering what the heck it’s up to, here’s a way to find out.
Press Shift-F10. This will open a console window. In the console window, type “taskmgr” and hit enter.
This opens the Task Manager, right in the middle of setup From here, you can go to the Performance tab of Task Manager and click “Resource Monitor…”
The Resource Monitor window shows you all kinds of things about what your system is doing, but expand the Disk section and then the File column and you can see what files are being accessed. This is a great way to at least convince yourself that Setup is busy doing something and not just hung.
You’ll probably see some log files being accessed during the setup as well – you can go back to the console window, go to the \Windows\Panther directory (“cd \windows\panther”) and see what log files there are. Type “dir” to see a list, and use notepad to have a look at them (for example, “notepad setupact.log”).
May 5th, 2010 at 11:06 pm
Great tip! Thanks so much for the suggestion. I’ve tried multiple times to do a repair upgrade to my existing Win 7 Ultimate. Each time it got to the “transferring files, settings” section I waited a few hours and then gave up.
I can’t imagine why MSFT doesn’t show some progress feedback during this portion of the install. Invoking the Resource Monitor and reading the log file, as you suggested, assured me that things were continuing to move forward.
Thanks again!