Vista died within ~20 minutes of installing it...

M

maxiedaniels

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May 25, 2005
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Okay, so last night I finally installed Vista. I put it on my second hard drive (XP is on my first). I was planning on setting up a dual-boot menu on startup, but I didn't get that far before Vista killed itself.

I plugged in my phone via usb (mass-storage device), and all was well. Vista recognized it. I was transferring things over to the phone, and then all of a sudden: 'Windows Sync Manager has crashed". Then it said something about trying to repair the issue. Then again, it crashes. And then: "Windows Sidebar has crashed". Again, it tried to repair it, and the repair window crashes.

So I take out my phone, and then I just started surfing sites on the internet (this site actually). Out of nowhere, "Windows Explorer crashed". So I'm stuck with no start menu or anything. Then it says that Windows needs to repair. After a while, it says it can't repair, and to try a System Restore. It does that, restarts, and says that I need to boot from the Vista cd and select 'Repair Computer'. I do that, and when it gets to the screen, it says that corruption is detected on my hard drive (secondary one with Vista) and that I need to run disk repair. I click okay, and it goes to disk repair. Scans my entire drive, and it says everything is fine. It goes back to the original screen, and once again says my drive is corrupt.

Okay, so I've officially lost faith in Microsoft. I want to attribute my issue to user error, but I barely did anything with the system. It only took around 20 minutes to completely fail on me.

Now, first, does anyone know what could have gone wrong? Is this some known issue?

Secondly, and more importantly, how can I boot back into XP? I was going to boot from the XP install disc and go into repair console and do the fixboot and fixmbr commands (I think those are right?), but I wanted to check with people on here first.

Thanks!
 
Vista installs a boot menu. To get into XP you just select it from the menu when booting up.

As far as your problem, well, I don't know what it is. Vista is VERY stable for me.
 
I never got a boot menu. After my bios startup screens, I get the 'boot from cd' screen (vista disc), and then it goes directly to booting vista. No option for XP.
 
dingobiatch said:
I never got a boot menu. After my bios startup screens, I get the 'boot from cd' screen (vista disc), and then it goes directly to booting vista. No option for XP.
Click to expand...

Your bios is set wrong. Tell it to boot from the hard drive, not the disc.
 
In circumstances like yours it's also worth checking that the system wasn't overclocked or had RAM settings tweaked when the OS was installed. Small I/O or memory errors during installion can cause file corruption which develops into catastrophic results later. If the system wasn't at default settings during install it's advisable to reinstall with them in that state.
 
Didn't read that suggestion about the BIOS until just then, but I ended up using the XP repair to do bootcfg /rebuild, and the only partition that showed up was my C:\WINDOWS (XP) one. Doesn't seem to know Vista exists. I think I'll try reinstalling Vista.

I don't have any overclocked settings in BIOS.

By the way, in that 20 minutes I had Vista up and running, I never installed any drivers. I have the Intel Badaxe 2 motherboard, nvidia 7950gx2, and audigy x-fi xtrememusic.
Should I have installed drivers? (I'm thinking it could have been a motherboard driver issue, is there drivers for vista yet?)
 
dingobiatch said:
I ended up using the XP repair to do bootcfg /rebuild, and the only partition that showed up was my C:\WINDOWS (XP) one. Doesn't seem to know Vista exists. I think I'll try reinstalling Vista.
Click to expand...

The reason it doesn't think Vista exists is because they are not on the same drive, therefore having two separate bootloaders. This will be fine if you want to manually select which HDD to boot from at startup.
 
dingobiatch said:
Didn't read that suggestion about the BIOS until just then, but I ended up using the XP repair to do bootcfg /rebuild, and the only partition that showed up was my C:\WINDOWS (XP) one. Doesn't seem to know Vista exists. I think I'll try reinstalling Vista.

I don't have any overclocked settings in BIOS.

By the way, in that 20 minutes I had Vista up and running, I never installed any drivers. I have the Intel Badaxe 2 motherboard, nvidia 7950gx2, and audigy x-fi xtrememusic.
Should I have installed drivers? (I'm thinking it could have been a motherboard driver issue, is there drivers for vista yet?)
Click to expand...

Yes, you absolutely must install the drivers.
 
fenton06 said:
The reason it doesn't think Vista exists is because they are not on the same drive, therefore having two separate bootloaders. This will be fine if you want to manually select which HDD to boot from at startup.
Click to expand...

shouldn't matter. It doesn't for my installation. But then I installed Vista after XP
 
There is also a patch on MS' update webpage for Vista and USB devices that fixes all kinds of issues.
 
fenton06 said:
The reason it doesn't think Vista exists is because they are not on the same drive, therefore having two separate bootloaders. This will be fine if you want to manually select which HDD to boot from at startup.
Click to expand...

That's not true. It doesn't matter where Vista is installed...if done correctly, you will have one bootloader for the system, with a choice of OSes.


As for the issue, is this a burned copy of Vista? I'm thinking it's either a bad burn, or a damaged disc. This isn't an Os problem, nor should the ridiculous step be taken of automatically blaming Microsoft. Again, the insanity of this is growing at a rapid pace.
 
I think self-destructing Vista is the norm, and we're choosing not to see it.

Maybe some day we'll be able to face the fact that the OS is simply broken....
 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
I think self-destructing Vista is the norm, and we're choosing not to see it.

Maybe some day we'll be able to face the fact that the OS is simply broken....
Click to expand...

I am not seeing self-destructing Vista because it is not happening on computers on which I install Vista. Vista for me has been at least as stable (with good drivers) as XP was at this point, which is very stable.

I strongly suspect the majority of problems with Vista are user self inflicted just like with most computer problems… stuff like not installing updated drivers. And I suspect some of the problems are just made up by people that have never used Vista repeating what they think the problems are.
 
You hit the nail on the head, Max Mike. The OP in this case didn't load any drivers, including chipset drivers, that are meant partially for the USB ports. Not that I'm saying that's the cause, but good drivers certainly enahnce the satbility of a system.

As far as self-destructing Vista, I've found it to be more efficient and more stable than XP is out of the box, with no updates or drivers.
 
Well, I'm now posting on Vista.

I reformated the drive, reinstalled Vista. Now dual-booting works for some reason.

It hasn't done anything bad yet, thank god. One thing, nvidia.com's driver section on their website won't work... I don't know if its just on my computer, if they're site is down.
Either way, Windows Update says I should install an important update. That important update is listed as NVIDIA drivers. But when I click install, it says it needs a restart to install the update.. and when it finally restarts, it still says I need to install the drivers...

heelp?
 
Did you run some hardware diagnostics on the hard drive (above and beyond Windows' basic diagnostic program)? A majority of the time I see that sort of behavior in Windows XP, there's an issue with the hard drive (either bad sectors, which Windows diagnostic program shoud've picked up on, or worse), though I have seen it with a burned disk that was bad, and faulty memory. . . as well as a number of other potential causes.

Basically I'm just not seeing a rhyme or reason to be blaming MS at this point for the issues.
 
If the chipset drivers don't say they are for Vista I wouldn't install them. I didn't install any for my ULI chipset mb and all is fine. Vista already has the drivers for this mb.
 
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