Woke up on 30th july feeling energised again, I tried to install win 7 again, getting the same result (stuck at 0% of Expanding windows files).
Found a completely unburned sector(s) on the install disk and became very suspicious. I went on to plug back my old HDD, did a little google, and burned a brand new disk using the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool. Viola, disk looks perfectly burned now. Even made a bootable USB drive just in case.
10.30am~ish. Elated to see % get past 0... 1..2..3...90..91....99.....100!!!
11am~ish. there are still much more to be done -- installing important progs and migrating my whole hdd over
[continued]
migrating software i used. dled norton ghost 15 and acronis, but in the end this simple program is all i need.successfully migrated my most recent HDD. went on to migrate the HDD i had before that (used back in the JC days).
failed many times. went on to do chkdsk several times. realised that chkdsk can actually be done in windows! (provided the drive is not in use of course)
Shutdown and removed the ancient HDD.
End product:
Oh my thats like one whole day spent. But definitely worth it. Now i have 3 generations of hard disks in a single hard disk!

Now~ to slowly fill the 2 very empty bars that i have. haha!
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