Windows 7 x86 upgrade hangs on FIRST BOOT with spinning icon

Katanga said:

FAT32 was brought in with Windows 95 OSR2 and that was the OS under which these partitions had originally been created. They were subsequently upgraded to Windows 98, 2000, Vista and 7, in that order.

I have ordered a copy of Acronis Disk Director 12, and upon receipt, will be able to put my theory to the test.

Acronis is a good one! I run with the Acronis TI 2012 still here for imaging purposes. The problem with most free trial versions of the retail products is they will tend to be limited.

As for FAT32 that was OEM OSR2 with 95 not consumer 95 back then with 98SE able to go onto FAT16 volumes as well. But it was FAT32 not 16 that brought in smaller disk clusters as part of the improved FAT. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/154997

OEM partitions are always maticulous with limited options for any custom situations. This is why when asked to debug a laptop new or older I have run into the need to see the drive wiped clean to start off fresh after someone got hit with a bug or simply ran into problems like deleting the wrong things?

Back in the 90s through the XP years you also saw the Proprietary limitations on anything OEM in contrast to how things have been made a bit more customer friendly in recent years. Drive capacities since Legacy to present has been a plus factor as well as far as custom set ups go. You couldn't do too much with 500mb drives!

Both 98SE and ME supported upto 64gb so simply an upgrade out of 98 to 2000 wouldn't have been any problem except still a bit tight on drive space. Got a bunch of old drives here too from those old museum pieces but are now simply going to collect dust.

Now as far as the fresh re-partitioning and re-OS-ing goes I would lean towards running 10 as a stand alone after having seen everything that was running on the 64bit 7 Ultimate running on the 64bit 10 Pro without much of a fuss. Having the dual OSs on two separate drives I rarely even look at the 7 drive which seems to have been lost in the shuffle somewhere! The second remote/test pc sees 10 Pro/7 Pro there across two drives with both desktops having plenty of storage/backup space between both additional and external drives. A brand new 10 laptop had to replace an older 7 model that failed a bit after that saw a 10 upgrade go on.

Vista(no longer supported) as well as 7 are simply geared for the present form of NTFS and the default cluster size. When trying to alter things Windows is simply hanging on startup not able to access the drive past the boot sector. That would be the first likely conclusion to make there. And Natively there isn't way to change it back to the defaults without a reformat of the drive.

Sector size changes for accessing larger capacity drives 2tb or more for example see support with 8, 8.1 while older versions besides XP's Fat support allowing for a small amount of diversity there require the 3rd party element to avoid the necessity of a reformat. The MS page you will want to review as far as what is supported by size of drive for example can be seen at: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/140365

The Mini Tool guide for PW's ability to change cluster size can be found at: Change cluster size for 4K disk with MiniTool Partition Wizard.

That one goes into expanding upwards from 512B to 4096KB rather then reducing the size however which there is no information found for. Either the change you saw failed for not being supported or it didn't complete would be the explanation for the hanging up you are running into however. Upon seeing 10 upgrades at first simply hanging up with a list of errors I simply resorted to upgrade fail followed by full clean install to clean up mess made! Later a bit after the TH2 update flopped in two months and new Insider builds seemed to have corrected the early goofs upgrades by the WU seemed to be going on smooth as silk. But all these became 10 over 10 upgrades to update.

The new boot sector seen since 8 was first out however now just about mandates running a dual boot across two separate physical drives due to the since 7 seen Secure Boot which sees any other OS as invalid. To get 7 on the same drive with second part? 7 would have to go on first and then block 10's want to upgrade over 7 for the custom install to the second primary that would be waiting for it. A fast change from D to G for example when booted in one version for the other version's part is the first in order of business to tend to in order to free up the D letter for optical. For seeing 7 go on last as pointed out in the guide however you would first need to disable the Secure Boot obstacle that would prevent the dual boot.