The short story is that I got a virus and decided the best way to get rid of it is to format the hard drive. So I pop in the Vista Home Premium DVD that came with the laptop. Coming to the step were you select the partition on which to install the OS, I first format the C partition (1st install attempt) and went to the next step, all went well until I came the the final screen were vista shows 4 steps it goes through.
On the first, copying files, it just jumps to 100%, on expanding files it goes very slowly counting to 100%, not sure if that’s normal. Before coming to the last step the laptop restarts and eventually comes to the last step, completing installation, there it just sits and goes no were! The only indication is that the hard drive activity light will work steady for two minutes then nothing at all. After approx 15 to 20 minutes the screen goes black and all I see is the mouse. The only thing now is to force a shut down.
On the second attempt I formatted the recovery partition, I have my data on a external hard drive. So I figured I don’t need that anyhow. Nothing different. On the third try I formatted everything and through the media direct CD utility I re-sized the C partition to use the whole drive. There was no difference, the install would freeze on the last step.
I also have a Windows XP Home OS that I figured I would try and see if that would work. But I get an error message that windows cannot find the hard drive and to make sure its connected and drivers are installed. I don’t get this with Vista.
If I understand correctly, the Media Direct DVD is used as some kind of driver, since the instructions for it say to install it before installing Vista. Media Direct will also get its own partition, about 2GB.
I would really appreciate some wisdom with this situation! I am usually able to figure stuff like this out myself, but this time, I’m at a loss.
Thanks in advance for your input!
The laptop does not have an operating system installed as its sitting right now. Remember the drive is formatted. The Vista install does not complete because of some unseen reason to me. If there is some trick to reinstalling a OS on a DELL computer?
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1 response so far ↓
1 Nicholas // Oct 9, 2008
You can try to re-install the system, install the driver and repair the system registry file.
It maybe able to help you solve problems Download Perfect Optimizer!
http://www.Best-Registry-Cleaner.info
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