Vista Home Premium Upgrade hanging on "Completing Installation"

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Houston3000

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My PC specs are in my sig, I have a 250GB SATA as my one and only hard drive, a very generic CDRW/DVDROM drive.

I just got Vista, I am trying to upgrade my version of Windows XP Pro 32bit to Vista Home Premium 32bit. I go through the installation setup and run the tool that checks whether my computer is compatable with Vista and get a huge check mark... only mentioning my Realtek HD Audio driver and Setpoint software will need to be updated. I go ahead and continue and choose my Primary C drive (only partition) to install Vista on. It prompts me the drive has data on it and will back up data into a folder called Windows.old I say proceed.

The installation goes on flawlessly and very quickly until it starts the "Completing Installation" phase. First time I let it sit for one hour before I cancelled the installation by rebooting - kicking me back and restoring my previous XP installation. The thing never freezes though, it just sits there with the 3 little dots blinking for ages. I unplugged my wireless mouse and keyboard and stuck in generic PS2 versions, not really thinking it would help, well it didn't the thing set at Completing Installation for 1 hour and 15 minutes before canceling ITSELF and restoring my XP installation.

Does anyone have any idea of how I can get this thing installed? Any help would be appreciated
 
I had a similar problem with one of my recent Vista installs... it was a clean oem install, not an upgrade, but it did the same thing. After going through and hanging at the same spot twice, I figured it was an issue with the machine not rebooting itself correctly, so I manually restarted the machine by holding the power button down and then immeidately restarted it, and voila!! It worked. Don't know why, and honestly, I'm not even really recommending this as a fix, but it did work for me.

Now, bear in mind that this was a clean install, so I didn't really have anything to loose by trying. The drive I was installing on had previously been triple booting XP, 5744 and Ubuntu, I had reformatted it to one partition in NTFS, but I have a feeling that something may have been left behind that was preventing it from rebooting correctly, however after I got Vista installed, all is well and it reboots just fine.
 
Well, the first time it happened I manually rebooted the PC and when it restarted it immediately went to the Windows XP recovery mode and restored my computer to what it was before.

I'm not trying to run the "upgrade" process, that isn't even available with XP Pro, I am simply going through the clean install through Windows. Using the upgrade, I don't think it's possible to install from a fresh boot on a formatted drive - it has to be ran from Windows to verify your copy of XP. That being said, after the first restart it doesn't load XP but boots straight into the Vista installer (reverting to 640x480 with I assume no sound as though it has unloaded my previous drivers) this is at about 27% of the "Expanding Files" stage. It continues shortly after until it reaches 100% then "Installs Features" and "Installs Updates" both very quickly. After that it restarts my computer again and brings me to a black screen saying something to the effect of "loading windows for the first time", after maybe 3 minutes of dots growing on my screen it goes back into the Windows Installer. From there it sits on the "Completing Installation" phase until I reboot or it reboots itself after about an hour telling me the installation was not successful. :confused:

I'm not sure if that is hardware issue or a software issue, at first I would assume it couldn't be software related because I thought it would format my drive, but the fact that it's able to restore it after the installation fails proves otherwise. For hardware I can't really figure what the problem could be, I've read some problem with Vista and SATA hard drives but it looked like there was only an issue if you had SATA drives in a raid configuration which I don't, I also only have one set of PATA IDE cables in my motherboard and they have my optical drives attached to them so I don't know how I'd even plug a PATA drive in to test it at this point... not that installing Vista on an old 60GB PATA drive would be any good to me anyways.

I'm going to probably have to call Microsoft, hopefully they'll be able to at least give me some hints on what the situation could be.
 
I did an upgrade in place install (mostly out of curiosity) on my laptop. Did it pass the point of checking your programs for compatability? It takes for freaking ever...
 
Like I said, I'm not doing an in-place upgrade. I am doing a clean install, it basically works by taking your entire Windows and moving it to a folder called "Windows.old", it erases everything else and installs the operating system as though it was a freshly formated drive.

Anyways, I thought I had a good chance today when I ran across a random forum post somewhere through a google search where someone said that people with GA-965P-S3 Motherboards would have to flash to the newest bios (released this last Sunday) or else their installation would freeze at Completing Setup... sounded perfect, but after a bios flash the problem persisted. I then tried disabling my onboard audio, disabling my onboard lan, telling the installation NOT to look for online updates during the install, reset my RAM voltage settings in the BIOS, basically reset the bios the default, updated my sound drivers to the newest XP version (Vista ones wouldn't install, gave a WDM error), I was quite out of ideas.

I talked to Microsoft Tech Support for 3 hours today and they couldn't figure it out. We went through a procedure where we tried to view the logs of the "failed" installation.... actually during the installation. Shift+F10 to bring up a command prompt during the install and then loading .log files. The error log was completely empty though, and the action log showed normal activity as far as the guy on the phone could tell. We then went through the process of loading task manager during the install, since the guy on the phone thought the installation was freezing during a final hardware test, and trying to force quit parts of the install while they were in process to bypass them, however none of the processes this tech was looking for were running. They're having a Service Level 2 Tech call me tomorrow after they "do more research".

I'm thinking it's a hardware issue though, does anyone have any experience installing Windows on a SATA drive? Do you know if you had any specific jumper settings? Maybe someone knows of issues with IDE DVD/CD drives (I had one friend who was forced to manually set his Master/Slave pins on his optical drives instead of using C-Select to get his version of Vista to burn DVDs... his at least installed though). Possibly even an noted incomparably with my RAM or Video Card?
 
Hello all…. well I have had the same issues...lets start off with my system.

Windows Vista Ultimate (Upgrade)
Intel® Core™2 Duo E6400 2.4Ghz W/ Zelman CNPS9700 LED Fan
Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 (V1.0) Mother B. W/ latest BIOS (Jan 07) OEM settings
600W Thermaltake Power Supply
Western Digital SATA 300 250GB NO Specific jumper settings
1 Gig of memory 2 X 512Mb
EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GS KO 256MB

First three (3) attempts the install would hang on "Completing Installation" even tried to leave it over night (8-9 Hours) to no avail... Called Windows tech and they stated that I might have a hard drive issues...not sure why the hard drive would be bad it works just fine with WIN XP.

So I purchased a new Hard drive for the hell of it, and still had the same issues with it hanging on "Completing Installation" ...I attempted to use a different SATA cable and new EDIE Cable for the DVD drive along with using the GSATAII 0/1 SATA connector slot (the purple one) as appose to the Yellow/Orange looking connector slot and VIOLA!

Now, since I made 2 changes after the initial Hard drive change I am not sure of what exactly happened to make it work….I can only recommend that people with the same motherboard try to use the purple colored SATA connector maybe that will work and I assume for any other mother board check to make sure your DVD drive, SATA and all general cables are in good working order.

Additionally, I reinstalled Vista a second time with success just to make sure that the first install was not a fluke. Now, maybe I don’t need a new hard drive but at $99.99 for 250 Gigs it’s not to bad and maybe I’ll use the other drive to back everything up.

Good luck and hope I was at least able to add to a possible hard resolution.

On another note I was able to install my other Vista copy on my Dell D820 Lap Top with ZERO issues and it actually installed faster than the desktop.


Thanks,

Nreque.
 
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