Black Screen when booting Vista 5308 on Dell 5150

I have been battling with Vista CTP (5308) for a few days. I have now
installed it twice now on my Dell Inspiron 5150 (80MB drive, 2Gb memory,
bios A38) and both times it has installed fine, automatically updated the
Nvidia FX5200 driver via Windows update and let me install applications,
even rebooting a few times as I go along and ending up with a working
system.

However in both cases when I came back to boot it the next day it will not
boot to a login prompt. I end up at a black screen (not a blank screen)
showing the build number in the bottom right. If I try to boot in VGA mode
or Safe mode I get exactly the same. I even tried booting with digital
signing off again no effect.

The only option seems to be a reinstall, a lot of work each day if I want to
use Vista!

It seems I am not alone in this problem, but normally most people can get
into Safe mode and remove some offending driver. This is not an option open
to me as Safe mode does not work.

The most common theory seems to be it is the Nvidia driver; so I booted with
the install disk, and opened a command prompt and had a poke around on drive
C: I renamed the nv4_mini.sys driver, had not effect on the Safe mode boot,
and killed the 'real boot'. This made me think it might not be the video
driver, as you would expect the VGA or Safe mode work.

I also thought it might be my Mcafee VirusScan 8 anti virus (though it
seemed to run OK, but won't auto-update), so I renamed the Network
Associates directory, again to no effect.

So I am open to any ideas

From your note it sounds like you have managed to install McAfee? How did you
do it? So far I have no luck getting it going and references I found so far
blaims IE 7.0 & McAfee not playing together. Is your experience any different?
Thanks
Z
MB: MSI K8NGM2-NBP
CPU: Athalon 4000+
RAM: 1 GB DDR
HD: WD 250 GB SATA
Optical Drive: Memorex CD-RW/DVD-ROM
Floppy: 1.44MB Sony
O/S: Vista Beta 2 Evaluation Copy 5308 (Installed: 7+ GB)

"Richard Fennell" wrote:

> I have been battling with Vista CTP (5308) for a few days. I have now
> installed it twice now on my Dell Inspiron 5150 (80MB drive, 2Gb memory,
> bios A38) and both times it has installed fine, automatically updated the
> Nvidia FX5200 driver via Windows update and let me install applications,
> even rebooting a few times as I go along and ending up with a working
> system.
>
> However in both cases when I came back to boot it the next day it will not
> boot to a login prompt. I end up at a black screen (not a blank screen)
> showing the build number in the bottom right. If I try to boot in VGA mode
> or Safe mode I get exactly the same. I even tried booting with digital
> signing off again no effect.
>
> The only option seems to be a reinstall, a lot of work each day if I want to
> use Vista!
>
> It seems I am not alone in this problem, but normally most people can get
> into Safe mode and remove some offending driver. This is not an option open
> to me as Safe mode does not work.
>
> The most common theory seems to be it is the Nvidia driver; so I booted with
> the install disk, and opened a command prompt and had a poke around on drive
> C: I renamed the nv4_mini.sys driver, had not effect on the Safe mode boot,
> and killed the 'real boot'. This made me think it might not be the video
> driver, as you would expect the VGA or Safe mode work.
>
> I also thought it might be my Mcafee VirusScan 8 anti virus (though it
> seemed to run OK, but won't auto-update), so I renamed the Network
> Associates directory, again to no effect.
>
> So I am open to any ideas
>
>
>