Reinstalling Vista

[kevvyb]

Have a friends PC to fix. Hard drive appears to ahve gone belly up. Cannot read fully, clicking etc.

Have new hard drive and trying to install Vista from the MESH recovery CD is giving odd result.

 

Install goes fine until reboot. BIOS gives option to 'ESC to boot' but doing so just takes me round again with the previous install of vista being moved to allow for the next install.

Pressing ESC to boot gives another dos command to press any key to boot from CD. This prompts another reinstallation. Trying anythign else just results in DOS disk read error.

I am not inexperienced in reinstalling operation systems. I have tried settign BIOS back to boot from hard drive as MESH advise that disk is not needed for rest of installation process.

 

Same result.

 

The new hard drive is partitioned with a GB primary active partition for the system and the rest (400GB or so) a logical partition for data.

 

I am corresponding on the MESH forum but this is painfully slow as posts cannot be read until moderator has allowed them and they are not coming up with much. BTW there is only 1GB RAM so it's not the 'Vista doesn't install with 2GB RAM or over' issue.

 

Can anyone give me any pointers? I have searched on web but have not found much but maybe I am searching for the wrong thing.

[Guest Wolfeymole]

I think what's happening here Kev is that you are making multiple partitions by pressing " Press any key to boot from cd" AFTER the initial request.

 

This is a most irritating windows foible and one that not many people know of.

 

On a new install when it asks to "Press any key to boot from cd" only press a key ONCE, when it asks agiain on subsequent reboots, PRESS NOTHING, just let it install.

 

Restart the installation and delete all previous partitions containing windows.

[kevvyb]

vista installation

 

Hi

 

Thanks for that. I'll give it another go but when I just left it the install just seemed to hang.

 

I've never had such problems before, it seems different to the installs of both XP and Windows 7 that I have done. Haven't installed Vista before though.

 

I will post back on results but I am not hopeful.

[kevvyb]

OK this time when the installation rebooted for the first time I did nothing. I did not press 'ESC to boot' and I did not 'press any key to boot from CD or DVD' when that message appeared. That was about 3 minutes ago and the screen is still hung with the latter message.

 

When installing XP and Win 7 I have never seen the 'ESC to boot' DOS message before, only the 'press any key....' message. Do you think this significant?

[kevvyb]

If I reboot now or take out the disk I think I will get the disk read error again with instruction to CTL ALT DEL to restart which does not work.

[kevvyb]

Vista installation hardware issue?

 

Win 7 install same result so it is not the MESH installation CD. Could it be hardware related.

 

Maybe that old keyboard getting in the way....? Something funny is happening with the keyboard indicator lights. Just noticed that even with machine switched off two lights remain on. Something I have not seen before. Am going to plug in my other keyboard and a wired mouse to see if that gets me anywhere.

 

Am barking totally up the wrong tree...?

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Sounds like the hdd is knackered to me mate.

 

If your trying to install 7 you are getting shut of any earlier versions of windows yes?

[kevvyb]

Vista / hardware install problems...?

 

Hi

 

I think that is very unlikely as hard drive activity looks fine for the install but bought two, one as back up so will put that one in and see what happens.

 

If it's the hard drive then it's basically knackered from new.

 

Once the initial install of Windows is done from the CD, on first reboot is the system then trying to boot from the windows installation on the hard drive...? You are right in that this is where the issue starts.

[kevvyb]

Don't beleive this! After the unmpteenth reinstall, the machine just booted into windows after the install routine. What do you make of that? Does this still the new hard drive...?