Vista installation hell

sekira05

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 5, 2008
Messages
310
I've spent countless errors attempting to install vista and I'm getting frustrated to insanity.

This is a brand new rig of one week and I initially put xp professional sp3 on. I bought the cheap vista home premium upgrade and was going to simply do the clean install by doing the install vista twice trick.

Note: I have updated DFI bios, everything at default, and DVD firmware up to date, and even tried with 2 gb of ram only.

I only have one hdd, so I formatted it clean and attempted to install vista. The first few times I tried, I kept gettting as far as 83% during the Expanding files phase. I keep getting the error:

Windows cannot install required files.Make sure all files required for
installation are available, and restart the installation. Error Code:
0x8007045D


I read up and supposedly vista has issues with some DVD drives. I have a pioneer dvr-115dbk with updated firmware, so it's not that. I tried another DVD drive, and my first attempt it got to 95%. After that, it kept giving me the error at 17%.

I also tried installing from windows, and halfway through the installation it simply says "the installation has been canceled"

I also tried copying all the files to windows and installing it off the hdd, and it gave me the same error ""the installation has been canceled"
 
Sounds like a possible hardware issue to me, Vista install is much more picky about that then XP. I had problems installing Vista the other day on my HTPC and it was due to a loose IDE cable on the DVD drive. I hadn't noticed it had come out a bit when I was rearranging power supply cables, it actually booted off the CD ok, but then failed during the install phase like yours is.
 
sounds like something is awry with the drive controller perhaps? I really don't think this is vista's fault.
 
I hope you are using a 40 pin IDE cable for your drive, if you are switch to a 80 pin cable (talking about your CD-ROM). I was running into very similar issues with a build and that ended up being the problem.

Edit: Sorry, just glanced at your post and didn't see you tried installing from a HD - I would say it is a hardware issue (as those above have stated).
 
I hope you are using a 40 pin IDE cable for your drive, if you are switch to a 80 pin cable (talking about your CD-ROM). I was running into very similar issues with a build and that ended up being the problem.

Edit: Sorry, just glanced at your post and didn't see you tried installing from a HD - I would say it is a hardware issue (as those above have stated).
A 40-pin cable for optical drive? I don't think that's the greatest idea really. I have run all my optical drives in the last 5 years with 80-pin cables with no problems whatsoever. For any semi-modern ATA drives, 40-pin cable recommendations are not a good idea.
 
if you are burning from an ISO, i found that it will only work if it is on 1x burn. otherwise i get that error.

otherwise, if tis a sata drive, put it in sata 4 or more (if you have that many).. sometimes that fixes it.
 
if you are burning from an ISO, i found that it will only work if it is on 1x burn. otherwise i get that error.

otherwise, if tis a sata drive, put it in sata 4 or more (if you have that many).. sometimes that fixes it.
I burned my vista ISOs at 12X and they work fine, so that's not the issue.

I have my DVD drive on SATA 3 and there are no problems so that's not the issue either. If you have to do either of those things, you have hardware issues..#1 would indicate a bad dvd reader/writer, #2 would indicate a problem with your motherboard.
 
What's this with 40 pin and 80 pin cd rom drives? are you guys talking about plain old ide or am i missing something.
Otherwise, is your dvdrom drive ide or sata? is your hdd ide or sata? does your mobod have sata? what type of sata 1.5 or 3? this might have an affect on installation, especially configuration. As others have mentioned before, you may have encountered a problematic cable or loose connection.
 
Well, first things first:

There is no such thing as an 80 pin cable. It's an 80 conductor cable - 40 conductors for actual signal, the other 40 aren't conductors and are only there as separators that help keep the higher speed/higher bandwidth signal from crossfeed and interference. The cables terminate in 40 pin connectors, commonly referred to at IDE or nowadays ATA connectors.

For optical drives, at this stage even a 22x DVD burner would just barely be reaching the absolute theoretical limit of an ATA33 connection - which is the max speed you'll achieve when using a 40 conductor/40 pin IDE cable. 22x burning speed times the 1.5MB/s (1x) rating of DVD burns = ~33MB/s, right at the theoretical max, but of course it won't actually go that fast. Today's 16x, 18x, and 20x burners work just fine without issues using 40 conductor IDE cables, and SATA drives are no different:

The SATA cable is just another simpler way to transfer data, but it doesn't automagically guarantee any benefits in terms of reliability or any speed difference in burning.

I think I'd hesitate to automagically call it a hardware issue as it could be a media issue (the upgrade disc). Since the OP tried different optical drives and is still using the same media (from what I can tell, he didn't say anything about making a copy or using another piece of media), I'd suspect it's the disc itself. Only suggestion I can make at this point is:

If you can get XP installed or you're currently running XP, make a copy of your Vista upgrade DVD, and do it at half the rated speed of your burner (1x is ridiculous, so is 2x, 6-10x somewhere in there is fine these days, I burn everything at 8x with verification even on my Plextor 18x so I know they're solid burns) - and yes, do the verification also.

If there's an issue with the original upgrade DVD, trying to copy it should bring that out and cause the copy process to halt. At least then you'd have confirmation that it's a media-related issue and then you can proceed from there. Microsoft would send you a replacement without issues I guess, just asking for a few bucks shipping and handling probably.

Good luck...
 
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