Vista Install Pains

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steveak

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 2, 2006
Messages
90
Several people had offered suggestions the past few days about a problem I was having intalling Vista in a new build. I had an interesting installation last night at home. I unplugged the front panel USB connector as one person suggested. Also set my SATA devices to AHCI as another person suggested. I also used an old PS2 keyboard.

I saved the BIOS and the computer restarted. I placed the installation disk in... and nothing. Same problem as previous: Boot failure.

Looked in the BIOS again, and it was showing that the first boot device was set as the floppy. However, I had changed it to be the DVD. Reset this to DVD, saved to the BIOS, and rebooted.

Same thing. My bios changes were not being saved, and this was causing the install to fail. It would stop before it found the bootable drive. After saving the BIOS settings, my computer would recycle on/off 4,5,6 times before it restarted completely.

(abit IP35-Pro, Crucial Ballistix, E6850, etc....)

Eventually, however, I got it to save the settings and installation started. But my PS2 mouse was slow and flaky, hardly working at all. So when I got to the point of being prompted to either install at that point or to create a partition, I accidentally said to install instead of first create a partition.

The install began OK then, but eventually bogged down. It eventually stalled out completely. The install started at about 9 p.m. but had not completed when I went to bed at midnight. I left it running, and when I got up this morning the installation had not gone any further.

So I ejected the DVD and shut off the computer. Will try again tonight.

Oh! I've searched the forums but will ask anyway: What is the optimum size to create as a partition for installing Vista (assuming that it works when I try it tonight)? I've seen some people recommend a partition up to 100 GB. (I've got a Seagate 320 GB hard drive.)

Thanks for your help.


steve
 
As for the partition size, if you plan on loading a lot of games, I'd go bare minimum with a 50 GB partitions. I always like to give my C drive room to grow, and have lots of free space, so 100 GB wouldn't be a bad idea. I have games installed that eat up over 10 GB alone. DiRT is 10.5 GB, I believe.

For the hardware issues, it's starting to sound like your board is flaky. Not saving the BIOS settings, especially without powering down is definitely board related. Also, have you verified that memory is voltage compatible with that board?
 
DeaconFrost said:
As for the partition size, if you plan on loading a lot of games, I'd go bare minimum with a 50 GB partitions. I always like to give my C drive room to grow, and have lots of free space, so 100 GB wouldn't be a bad idea. I have games installed that eat up over 10 GB alone. DiRT is 10.5 GB, I believe.

For the hardware issues, it's starting to sound like your board is flaky. Not saving the BIOS settings, especially without powering down is definitely board related. Also, have you verified that memory is voltage compatible with that board?
Click to expand...

I'm not a gamer so that's not an issue for me.

I checked on the abit website, and DDR2 800 Ballistix is definitely compatible.

steve
 
make sure your ram is running at the recommended voltage. i run my crucials at 2.2 volts. it wouldnt hurt to flash the bios with the latest version then load optimized defaults. if that still doesnt work your board is messed up and you should return it. vista takes less than 30 minutes to install usually. its fast.
 
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