The clean install appears to go well and gets through the first reboot just fine. After another reboot, the screen stays black except for a short text in the lower-right corner. It says "Windows 7 Evaluation Candidate Build 7100". after a wait of 20 minutes, a cursor could be produced, which moved normally. Ctrl-Alt-Del produced nothing, nor did "enter/return". The disk activity light would flash momentarily periodically, as if a "hung" condition, or loop existed. The machine was restarted from a power-down state and the installation tried again with the same result. The hardware description is as follows;
MSI X58 Eclipse motherboard
Intel Core i-7 965 CPU
6GB DDR3 Triple-channel G.Skill memory
3 Western Digital 10,000 RPM disks. One used as the system disk (C:), the other two arranged in a RAID 1 configuration.
MSI N285GTX 2TD1G OC graphics card
CPU is running as it came out of the box - no overclocking. The graphics card is also at factory speed. Any thoughts?