Hello! I've installed Windows and various server installations hundreds of times and have never run into an issue like I have at this moment. The first time that I inserted the disc to install Windows Server 2008 R2 I went through the normal process of creating the space for the install, making sure the disc was formatted properly, and ready for the install. I selected my disc and it started "Copying Windows Files". Shortly after, I received an error which required a reboot, which I have seen before. On reboot, it resumed the installation at "Expanding files", but it then said that the installation could not continue. I went back and formatted the disc again, burnt a new image of 2008 R2, and restarted the install. This time and all subsequent trials result in the same issue "Cannot Install...". I noticed that each and every time the "Copying Windows Files" goes from 0% to 100% in about a split second. Has the install cached the installation files somewhere in memory? It seems that when the installation goes to "Expanding" it is always accessing the same copied files, resuming from the previous spot of install, even though those files may/are corrupt. If anyone has any feedback or information, please let me know. I've tried different physical hard drives, different installation media, and various boot formats, but the installation errors and strangeness are all the same every time. Thanks!

Can you check a few of the setup logs to get a better idea of what's going on? You can find the location of some of the logs at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927521. You can get the logs by connecting the drive to another machine or by opening a command prompt during setup by pressing SHIFT + F10. Feel free to post the last few lines of the logs and I'd be happy to take a look and see if we can figure out what's going on.

Hi Jrennard3, I believe there is a reserved allocated partition during OS installation. Therefore i would suggest you 1) use seagate tools to write the hard disk to 0. 2) Boot using ubuntu OS disc, by selecting boot using disc instead of installing it. and using Linux Gpart to f/disk then proceed with clean installation again. Hope this works. In any case if you required further assistance please feel free to post :) will be glad to assist you further :)Guowen Su | CCNA, CCIP, MCP, MCSA, MCSE, MCTS, MCITP, CEH | http://www.microsoft.com/en/sg/default.aspx Our Goal? VERY SATISFIED Customers. If you're not...let's talk!!

Thanks for the replies! I just discovered my problem and I guess I should have had less faith in hardware than I have...The CD/DVD drive was bad. I found this out by leaving the server on its side after removing an internal device. I booted and tried it again with the DVD in vertical position and the process went further and nearly completed before erroring out again. So, that made me think that it was the CD/DVD drive. I decided to boot to a bootable USB flash drive with the install files on it and it is working fine now! Thanks again!