I win! (was I give up)

[Raduque]

It was my bloody stupid frickin primary HD - Vista didn't like my WD 80gb drive for some reason. I installed it to one of my secondaries, a 250gb Seagate, and it installed perfectly, go figure.



I give up. Vista has beaten me. Wore me down through attrition. It simply sits thrashing the HD during install at "Completing Installation". It sits.... and sits.... and sits. I let it run overnight last night, 8 hours which was my 3rd try. I woke up to a screen that said something about the install was interrupted before completion and to restart windows install from the DVD. So I did, that was about 8am, and I let it run up until about 30 minutes ago when I got tired of seeing that "Completing Installation" screen and put windows XP back on.

I tried so many things, shuffling my ram around, disconnecting my other two HDs, tried two different video cards and even another different HD, and new IDE and SATA cable.

Oh, and the first time I started the install, it was lightning fast, maybe 35 seconds from boot to copying files, but it still stalled out for 5 hours at Completing Installation. Every time since that first incomplete attempt, it takes at least 5 minutes from boot till it gets to the screen where you choose the language.

And it's not like my system can't handle Vista:
Core2 6300
7900gs
gigabyte S3
2gb ddr2-800

I just don't know what to do to make it work, and that new "improved" windows PE gives absolutely no feedback about what's going on at all.

Anybody got an unactivated XP MCE OEM they wanna trade for Vista Home Premium?

 

[Puffnstuff]

Ok is your ram set to the correct voltage? If not then adjust it manually. If that doesn't work then go into bios and set it to default settings and see if it will install windows. Are you using a sata or ide optical drive? Do you have another drive you could install windows with? Listen I feel your pain as I spend all day Thursday with an msi k8n neo4-f that kept on dropping both optical and hard drives while I was trying to install vista. I finally took that board back and got a bfg nf4ultra mb and it worked right the first time. You might just have a bad mb. One more thing. When you attempt to install vista next time and you get to the screen where it shows all of the available drives select the drive then look at the options underneath that window and select format to remove all data on that drive just in case there's a problem on there that is holding you up before you attempt to install it.

 

[Raduque]

I, unfortunately, only have one other working DVD drive - it's in my HTPC. I also tried setting BIOS to defaults - the ram is set manually to it's 2.0 volts. I really don't want to get a new mobo, till now, I haven't had any problems. XP installs perfectly in about 30 minutes.

Is there anyway to get a more detailed mode out of the new Vista PE?

 

[Puffnstuff]

Can you run memtest on the new stuff and see if it can get through 2 passes without errors? If it does then take one of them out and see if you can install vista? Also do you have them in the right slots? You must read the manual to see which two slots must be occupied first, usually it's 1 & 3 but check the manual to be sure.

 

[Raduque]

I have the ram installed correctly, and it passed memtest when I first installed it. It also passed Vista's memory test also. I tried both sticks in all 4 slots (8 combinations), and none worked.

 

[trainmaster5]

I also tried installing Vista Ultimate on a MSI K8N Neo 4 board. Disabled AV, etc.. It seemed to install in spurts. 3 hours later it finally got to the language setup screen. It finally got to the starting Vista screen and then started an endless cycle of reboots, at least 10. I could hear my Audigy 4 try to kick in but then more reboots. I finally gave up when I got error messages about the installation failing due to Nvidia driver errors. Anyone else get this far before a failure? My Intel install took about 45 minutes, P965 board.