Black screen with infinite white dot beachball after install/reboot

On an Alienware aurora with an SSD, I know these boxes are finicky about OS installs, I can't get 8 to stick.

After reboot it goes to a black screen with a circle of white dots that keep swirling around, never updates. reboot brings me to a window that lets me select Windows 7, 8 install and 8. Selecting anything but 7 goes back to the swirl. Selecting 7 removes all 8 install data and resets to 7....

Any clues how to make this work?

open msconfig in whatever OS you can get to. Try messing with "boot" tab in there