I'm looking for some ideas on this baffling problem.
I have three Vostro 1720 laptops from about 4 years ago. They all arrived in the same shipment. Their BIOS's were updated to the same version.
They had been on Win7, so late last year I clean-installed 8.1 Ent on two of them (full wipe, bootable media). All went well.
The last one had been working fine with Win7, but it was time for a new install. I've been trying to install 8.1 Ent on it ever since.
Setup fails during the "Getting files ready for installation" installation stage every time (at a random %, error 0x80070002). That's the stage following "Copying Windows files," which always completes.
I've confirmed that this is not the fault of the DVD or USB used for the install (I've tried both), as they both work fine for other machines.
Win7 installs fine.
At first, I thought surely it was a compatibility quirk with the newer 8.1 (the other machines were installed with the original 8.1), but no, even the original 8.1--the same one I used for the other two machines!--fails.
I've run MemTest86, no problem. I've run chkdsk /r and HDD Regenerator, no problem.
Nothing odd set in the BIOS (in fact, reset to defaults for good measure). AHCI is on, just as it always is on all of these machines.
What could it be? Unfortunately, most of the discussion about this error on the Internet has to do with update errors once Windows is already installed (like upgrading from 8.0 to 8.1), which is completely N/A to me.
I'm about to try 8.0 Ent next, but this is getting ridiculous at this point and makes no sense at all.