Please help me! (vista installation woes)

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Tzzird

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My brother's computer is acting strangely upon a vista installation. He decided to do a clean install of vista because his computer was starting to act curiously slow with XP home. Right before his reinstall, he put in another gig of memory for a grand total of 2 gigs. After formatting the C drive and beginning the install process, he found that the installation would get stuck at certain points. Initially it was 28% and after a few hours, he rebooted started over. Then he got to a higher percentage but it would get stuck again. He must've done this process over and over 20+ times before quitting. Now I'm trying to figure out what the issue is, maybe you can help me:

His system is a Soyo motherboard p4, 2.4 ghz, one 1 gig module and two 512MB modules. Video card: Sapphire x800GTO AGP, DVD-drive - NEC 16X, PSU - Thermaltake 430Watt.

Here are all the things I've tried:

1) Replace his aging 330W Enermax PSU with my spare Thermaltake.
2) Swapping out his NEC DVD drive with my LITE-ON DVD drive.
3) 1 gig module by itself, the two 512 modules by themselves, all 3 modules in at once

The hard drive is a Maxtor 80gig drive. My guess is that this hard drive is bad. A replacement drive is en route but won't be here today.

Here's the interesting thing about the installation. The twenty times he tried the installation, he got either a stuck percentage (usually on the 2nd of 5th stage) or an error code regarding a missing file. One time he was able to get to the fifth stage, but it was stuck as well. Now that the computer is with me, it takes over 20 minutes to even get to the first screen where you can click the "OK" button.

Does this sound like a hard drive issue to you or motherboard or something I haven't mentioned?
 
Try cleaning the disk with diskpart.

Boot to your Vista DVD. Select repair -> next -> open command prompt.

Type diskpart
select disk 0
clean
exit
exit

Then reboot and restart installation.

more info on diskpart: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415/
 
calebb said:
Try cleaning the disk with diskpart.

Boot to your Vista DVD. Select repair -> next -> open command prompt.

Type diskpart
select disk 0
clean
exit
exit

Then reboot and restart installation.

more info on diskpart: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415/
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion calebb. Before reading this, however, I put in an old 10 gig hard drive and the installation has been seamless thus far. We'll see if it goes all the way through.

I think that hard drive was broken When I tried booting up on a floppy earlier, it would not recognize a c drive when I typed format c:

Is there a way to figure out if a hard drive is completely dead?
 
Tzzird said:
Is there a way to figure out if a hard drive is completely dead?
Click to expand...
Daignosis tools should be available for download on the manufacturer website. But a better approach would be to simply discontinue using a hard drive once you've lost confidence in its reliability.
 
It will only take 5 minutes or less to run diskpart -> clean. This will clear the MBR/GPT sectors on the hard drive...

the fact that your c: drive was not initialized when booting from a floppy is not surprising - most floppy boot disks cannot mount NTFS partitions.

And, as catweazle mentioned, you can get a utility from the website of your HDD manufacturer that will perform a comprehensive drive scan.
 
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