Windows Vista Vista clean install on A7N8X-E trouble

I am running A7N8X-E with 2G RAM and AMD XP 3000 (I disabled SATA on the mobo since I am only running IDEs).
I have 2 Seagate ST320011A (20G each) and a Wester Digital WD600BB (60G)

Primary IDE
Seagate 1 is Pri. Master
Seagate 2 is Pri. Slave

Secondary IDE
Western Digital / Sec. Master
Memorex DVD / Sec. Master

However, I cannnot get Vista to install. I get past the "Windows is loading files..." and then I get stuck on the second progress bar (with the MS copyright at the bottom). Sometims I get 4,5,7, even 9 iterations and then it just stops _dead_!

What amd I doing wrong here?

Thanks for your help.

Mike

 

How are you trying to install? Form within Windows or booting from the CD? Is it on a new partition or an upgrade install of XP? If upgrade you need more than 8 gigs of free space on the partition. What’s on your hard drives at the moment and which partition are you trying to install to? I have it on a A7N8X-E so unlikely to be a motherboard issue.

 

How long did you wait Mike? It went OK for me from a downloaded ISO burnt to a DVD, but it did take ages, roughly 20 minutes for the loading of files.
Same MB with an Athlon XP+3200.

Roger

 

I tried both. From within Windows and straight boot. From windows, it goes through the entire gui-based setup but once it reboots, Setup stops at the black screen and there is no activity at all on the progress bar. When I boot fron the DVD, I get through the file-copying phase and then it stops at the progress bar. I try to put evrything on disk0/part0.

 

The "Windows is loading files..." took about 3 minutes when I booted from the DVD, and the upgrade from within XP took about 20 min - 1/2 hour. I left it at the progress bar screen overnight.

 

Is there another Windows OS on the same hard drive? If so it will be trying to setup its dual boot system on a partition further down the drive. I’ve also had occasional problems when I had unusual partition setups. Don’t think the Beta-2 installer is quite up to the unusual yet. Do you want Vista to set up dual boot?

 

I _can't_ get to the product page key when I boot from the DVD. Setup loads files, and then it stops. I can't read the logs, since nothing is written to disk.

Take a look at this: http://type3.net/vista/

I did this in VMware just to give you an idea of what happens in DOS.

 

No, I want it to scrap XP. There is an XP installation there, but I don't care about it. I planned on deleting it when I get to the partition-selection phase of the Setup. And I am installing on the first disk w/o any extended partitions or logical drives.

 

Can you complete the install in VMware or does it stop at the same point? If it does then I would say it has to be a bad CD.

 

Yeah, I got everything running inside VMware. It took some tweaking to get the sound running, but I used Creative driver for Win2K I had laying around and it worked just fine. I even got NOD32 to run on it.

 

If it’s not a bad CD then there must be something about the hard drive it does not like. You sure it's the boot drive in the bios? Did you have a third party boot manager installed to the MBR, or another way of dual booting that may have marked the primary partition/s as inactive? Check the partition you want to install to is the Active one on the drive and even format it or delete it beforehand. Or try deleting the MBR or doing a Zero Fill on the drive, but be careful if you have other hard drives connected.