Windows Vista Vista installs but won't boot

Infuriating!!
My Vista arrived today, Home Premium. Prepared and formatted a partition on disk 0, the same disk as XP. Installed from XP to this partition. All seemed to go well, fully installed, re-booted and got a black screen with some HD activity. After about 15 minutes I shut down, re-booted, selected the "Earlier version of Windows ", no XP boot.
I restored an image of XP, did a big search on these forums and found my deliberate mistake, (oversight) I had not made the new partition Primary instead of logical.
Formatted the Vista partition, made it Primary, and re-installed Vista from XP. I got to the screen "Completing installation" with the green progress bar which was static for about ten minutes, then it crashed to a black screen with no HD activity.
Re-booted, chose the "Earlier version of windows" again, and this time XP started OK. Only odd thing was that the date and time were wrong, easily fixed.

Any suggestions as to a solution? Clean install to a prepared Primary partition and it won't boot. I am tempted to try making the Vista partition Active, but I believe that it is not possible to have two Active partitions on the same HD. Is this correct?
Anyway, I've had enough for one day - G & T time now - maybe a boot-full!

Roger

 

It's an upgrade Steve, but the option of a clean install is offered.
Roger

 

Hi All,

Problem solved ! ! ! Quite a horror scenario, but my fault after all, and I am posting this in case it helps somebody else.

I run a two display set-up of a Samtron 19" LCD and an old Samsung 17" CRT. I only switch on the CRT when it will be used, ie Photoshop mainly. I did try installing Vista by booting from the DVD with exactly the same result of a crash when Vista opened. Typed in the product key, got the message "To use this product key start the installation from Windows" so I removed the key, and selected the previously formatted partition. The installation went normally to the same point then crashed again. I rebooted and tried Safe Mode, only to be told "Vista cannot install in Safe Mode restart the computer "

I restarted the machine, but for some reason this time I switched on the CRT, and when the apparent crash occurred only the LCD blacked out and the installation continued on the CRT to the end. It was obviously the LCD driver causing the problems.

Downloading and installing the nVidia Vista driver didn't help at all, but the Vista driver from Samtron did, and now my Vista is up and running.

Roger

 

With hindsight, I must pose an hypothetical question.

If I had not had a CRT connected, even if I had decided that it was the monitor driver causing the problems, how would I have installed the correct Vista driver for the Samtron monitor. The only way I see would have been to install the Samtron driver into XP (If it would work), and do an upgrade install over my XP.

With the popularity of LCD displays nowadays, I am sure that somebody will encounter this problem, and it might in fact, prevent a clean install.

Any thoughts?

Roger

 

Well, you aren't the only one that has a problem of this type Roger. I've been running Vista RC2 since it was released. I have a LCD monitor and although it never gave me problems during the install, it does act odd at times when I boot to Vista. I don't know for sure which screen it's at (I'll have to pay more attention next time) but some where along the way in the boot process my monitor goes into it's sleep mode. Sometimes it comes back on before it's done booting, sometimes not. I can however make it work again by turning the monitor off using the power button on it, and then turning it back on. I probably would have thought mine had crashed the first time it did it too except my monitor shows a message that it's going into sleep mode before it blacks out. The first time it happened, I saw that and saw the light had changed on the power button so I just shut it off, turned it back on and I was once again watching it boot. It never gives me any problem while windows is running though. Go figure.

 

I've used a Microtek LCD monitor with Vista for almost a year now. The only issue is that, occasionally, the screen will go black for a second when switching to another app. I use the default monitor drivers with it.

At work we've got 2 LCD monitors and an LCD TV which work fine on the final release of Home Premium. They also use the default monitor drivers. We removed the original LCD yesterday and plugged in the new one without any issues in the turnover.