Not having a Del key on a keyboard turned out to be a major pain in the backside. The only way I could get into the Bios settings was to take apart the PC and reset the CMOS jumper on the motherboard conveniently located directly under the hard drive. Doing so forced the machine to prompt to reset the bios at boot-up by pressing a function key instead. This was not ideal but enough to attempt running some software as I could now know that everything so far had tested out OK.

I started off with a live USB version of Xbox Media Centre XBMC. Plugging this in and rebooting I was pleased that it immediately launched the software. However I did not want to boot from USB everytime and so restarted and this time selected the Xbmc live option of installing to disk. This seemed unusually slow to get started but eventually the install dialogs opened. However, once all the options had been configured and the copying of files to disk started it became apparent that things had stalled at 43%. Retrying the process several times changed nothing.  Did I have a problem with the drive or worse a problem with the SATA controller on the motherboard?

My next attempt to figure this out was to try and install Ubuntu Linux from USB. Again a similar experience. Everything appeared fine until the installer tried to copy files to the disk and then everything hung at 46%. again, I tried several times but nothing changed.

So how about Windows XP installed from an external USB DVD drive? no sir! It didn't like it. The error message, again strangely at around 46%, mentioned the possibility of hardware failure or boot sector viruses... great.

During the various attempts to install something, anything on this machine I tried changing SATA cables, reseating the drive and for some reason had to clear the CMOS on occasion just to get it to boot from USB. This was a week of frustration as it appeared I had built a very complicated doorstop. I also noticed within the system logs within the Bios that keyboard errors were being detected after every forced clearing of the CMOS. I really had to get a new keyboard.

To try and isolate the exact issue and knowing that I could at least run software in memory I followed some advice I read online. Downloading an iso image of an ultimate boot disk I went through a by now familiar process of creating a bootable USB stick from it.

This was perhaps something I should have done much sooner. Booting into the USB drive I was presented with a simple text menu listing all manner of diagnostic utilities. Of particular interest to me right away was a tool to test the memory (took about an hour to run and gave a clean bill of health) and a Seagate disk checking tool (took about 90 minutes to run and also gave a clean bill of health). I played around with some other tools and each time the message was the same. It seemed the hardware was all working fine which meant that the problem lay in software and more likely device drivers.

Rather than spend another week trying to get XBMC or Ubuntu to work I fell onto my last resort and ordered a copy of Windows 7 home premium 64bit (at the same time getting a new keyboard). All I can say is that the experience of installing Windows 7 on this machine was a dream. Most importantly it didn't hang. In less than 40 minutes I found myself looking at a freshly installed desktop on my plasma TV. From this point it was a simple job to download and install the latest motherboard drivers from Zotac. Everything seemed fine with the default Windows drivers but this would try to ensure all expected functionality was available.