Vista Setup Doesn't Complete

V

Vlad

Member
Hi guys :tongueout:

I have 3 SATA disks:

#1: two partitions, C and D, with XP SP2 on C
#2: one partition, E
#3: two partitions, F and I (I've made the latter with Partition Magic, G & H are my two dvd burners)

ALL partitions are "Primary", C is also (obviously) "Active". I didn't make partition "I" active because I thought it wasn't necessary for installing Vista. Ok, I booted the Vista dvd, it installed Vista into "I", no prob, rebooted, chose Vista from Vista boot manager screen, loaded the first step where you can see the green leds flashing in the middle of the screen, after 1/2 mins. it shows a black screen, little or no hard disk activity, and it stops loading Vista........

If I try to boot "Earlier Windows version" (XP, of course) no problem at all, XP loads. Vista hangs. Tried to set "I" partition to Active and nothing changed, as before, still not booting Vista.

This thing is driving me mad, any suggestions? :rage:
 
Hi Vlad, welcome to NeoSmart Technologies.

How about starting the Vista setup from within Windows XP? It sounds like this is a driver-related issue where Vista isn't recognizing your hard drive. Starting setup from XP should do the trick.
 
Hi Computer Guru,
and thanks very much for your quick reply.

You tell me to start the setup from XP...wow, I'm a little scared to do that, I hope the Vista dvd lets me choose the "I" partition to install it into, and doesn't do a whole mess of everything.. it really puzzles me why Vista shouldn't recognize my SATA Seagate hd, XP recognized it without any problem, not requiring any driver to install to make it work...weird, really.

The "I" partition should be "Active" or is it enough to leave it to "Primary"? (just a general info)

Thank you :|
 
The partition with boot.ini on it (and ntldr and ntdetect.com) shoud be Active. You really shoudn't change that setting, it's almost always correct.

Windows Vista will ask you what partition to install to, don't worry about that :smile:
 
Computer Guru said:
The partition with boot.ini on it (and ntldr and ntdetect.com) shoud be Active. You really shoudn't change that setting, it's almost always correct.
Click to expand...

I.e. the partition C, the one with XP working (at least, until now :lol:smile:

Computer Guru said:
Windows Vista will ask you what partition to install to, don't worry about that :smile:
Click to expand...

Ok... you made me calm :??
I'll try this evening and will let you know if I screwed everything up or if it works like charm (got a backup of all MBRs, just in case...)
Cheers!
Vlad
 
Good morning,

unfortunately it didn't work, same thing as before, the installation isn't completed, the screen goes black and no activity. Tried to "repair" the installation with the tool included on Vista's first installation screen on dvd, it searched for problems for 20 mins and carried on searching, it didn't found anything, I stopped it.

Tried to install XP and Vista on another pc with two separate hds, multiboot works perfectly.

Any suggestions? :wtf:
 
Only thing I can think of is a bad MBR.... Try to go to the "command prompt" in the repair options section and type this in:

Code: 
bootsect.exe /nt52 all /f
[FONT=Consolas]bootrec.exe /fixmbr[/FONT]
[FONT=Consolas]exit
[/FONT]

And try to install Vista again.
 
No way

Hi Computer Guru,

I tried what you wrote but it didn't work. Tried to reinstall Vista (another copy as well), but the installation phase doesn't complete. Tried to move the two dvd burners from g-h to h-i, in order to reserve space for the "f" letter to Vista, no way. Could it be some recognition problem on the Sata disks? If I install Vista on VMWare, no problem at all. If I boot from Windows Vista Dvd and tell the system to check for errors, it stays there for hours and finds no problems... If you have any other suggestions, I'd be glad to hear them.
 
Well, can you use
Code: 
diskpart
list disk
select disk [B]x[/B]
list part

You can use that to see if it recognizes your drive.
 
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