How long does Vista take at the "Please Wait" Screen?

Zepher

Zepher

[H]ipster Replacement
Joined
Sep 29, 2001
Messages
20,937
Reinstalling Vista on a customers machine with the Dell supplied Vista Disc and it has been sitting on the "Please wait" screen for probably 20 minutes.
Is that normal?
 
not really, what happened to that PC btw?
 
This is what the customer told me, There was an error with Firefox which the fix was to install Service Pack 1, but the machine already had SP1 on it. After SP1 was installed again, the machine would get to a black screen that says something like like on it,
! 0xc0000034 !! 142/53007 (_0000000000000000.cdf-ms)

I tried to do everything here,
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975484/
and the computer will go to the Startup Repair screen and I can't cancel it, and just runs and runs and runs. I let it go for 4 hours while I ran some errands.

So I backed up up the data and am just re-installing Vista.
 
so, you are installing Vista from scratch? reformat the hard disk?
and now you have problems installing it.

Have you check the hardware? make sure everything is plugged in correctly, check the HD cables to see if they are ok. Reset the BIOS and reconfigure it.

in this "Please wait" screen, does the HD led stays on the whole time?
 
I am installing from Scratch, didn't format the drive yet.
HD cables are fine. I had to pull the drive out to back it up.

Don't remember if the HD light was on or not.

I am loading Windows 7 now to see how the machine works with it.

Oh, the only hardware I have plugged in are a Keyboard, mouse, DVD, and HD.
 
You might want to quick format the drive, just in case, some malware is still lurking around :p
Well i asked you about the led on, because when there are problems accessing the HD (hard disk about to die) the HD led tends to stay on, meaning the machine is trying to read/write in the HD but can't.

Also try resetting the BIOS and reconfigure it
 
It appears that there were errors on the drive.
Windows 7 installed but during it's first boot had to scan the drive for about 20 minutes recovering clusters and what not.
 
Zepher said:
It appears that there were errors on the drive.
Windows 7 installed but during it's first boot had to scan the drive for about 20 minutes recovering clusters and what not.
Click to expand...

RMA it or throw it away :eek:
 
leSLIe said:
RMA it or throw it away :eek:
Click to expand...

I am going to let the customer decide tomorrow when I call them.

It appears that they don't need a large drive, this computer is 3 years old, has a 250GB drive, and only had 24GB used.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top