Installation - Expanding files 21%

[Guest]

Frustrating, disappointing, slow, and plain bad are a few words I'd use to
descibe MY experience with Vista thus far.

My recent foray after testing Vista with Virtual PC was to upgrade my home
system.

I proceeded cautiously. As a Microsoft Certified Professional and Microsoft
Small Business Specialist, I know that is a must. Who really knows what is
going to happen? Microsoft certainly doesn't.

Anyway, I ran the Vista Advisor to be sure that my system was upgradable.
All checks came back OK with a couple of warnings stating that I should visit
WindowsUpdate after the upgrade. As stated by the Windows Vista Upgrade
Advisor, "Your computer can run Windows Vista". So I started the upgrade.

At Expanding Files 21% after a reboot, the system simply frooze. No error
message. I had to hard reset the PC.

So now I've scoured the internet and newsgroups, and I've found no solution.
Surely, there is a solution other than wiping the PC clean. But who knows?

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi John,

Could be a number of things. Some RC burns had issues if they were done at
high speed, so caused errors during setup. Could be faulty memory or the
hard disk seized. What happens if you restart with the DVD? and without it?
Is the drive intact?

Hopefully, as a professional, you made a proper backup prior to the upgrade
attempt. You may be stuck with restoring it.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Henry Jones]

I had a similar experience with the installation. I also did an upgrade and
it was very slow, took
1 1/2 hours, I thought the system was frozen but it came back to life. I
then got smart.

I reformatted the hard drive and did a clean install. Everything went
quick, installation took about half an hour

Maybe there was issues during the update. Who knows. But I never have
liked an OS update, I prefer a clean install when
it's possible.

 

[Jeff Schafer]

Give it time...mine sat there for 25 minutes before it continued on. How
long have you waited before trying again?

Jeff

Yes, all important data is backed up to external HDD and DVD.

So, I've been content to install a clean Vista. But now, it doesn't get
past expanding files 0%.

Hard drive is IDE/ATA. Shuttle ST62K, P4 3.0, 1.5gb RAM, 160gb Hitachi
Deskstar HDD, Sony DVD-R.

 

[Guest]

Hey John,

I'm having - more or less - the same problem here.
Expanding goes on to around 21%, then my PC tells me it has to reboot. Well
- fine with me!
But trying to reboot the only message I get is "Disk read error".
In other words: The old (XP-) bootsector seems to have vanished and the new
one (Vista Ultimate) is not yet properly installed.
It makes no difference at all if I do an upgrade or a clean install.
The only probable cause I came up with was a memory problem. But any memtest
I run delivers no problems at all.
Not to mention that the Vista upgrade advisor gave the green light as well.

I could get my XP back running by using the repair-function. Boot sector
re-installed and XP was running again.

However I would like to get my shiny new Vista Ultimate running. But nobody
really can tell me what the problem might be.

Maybe one question for all those who did succeed in installing Vista:
Is it normal that the PC reboots at around 21% or should it wait until all
files are expanded??

Mike

 

[totallygreen]

Maybe one question for all those who did succeed in installing Vista:

Is it normal that the PC reboots at around 21% or should it wait until all
files are expanded??

Mike

I am wondering the same thing. TG

 

[Adam Albright]

I am wondering the same thing. TG

Yep, its suppose to. This is the 1st attempt to boot some drivers.

 

[totallygreen]

Yep, its suppose to. This is the 1st attempt to boot some drivers.

Thanks for the info, after this first reboot, my install seems to hang
at the bluish colored vista screen. Maybe I'm being impatient and not
waiting long enough, But I did wait at least an hour.

I would then get frustrated and hold the power button in. I'll try
again tonight before I go to bed and let it run overnight on a system
that has a fresh install of Windows Xp. Plus I'll remove all the
extra stuff like my TV tuner, second hard drive, second optical drive
and of course all the USB stuff.

 

[Adam Albright]

Thanks for the info, after this first reboot, my install seems to hang
at the bluish colored vista screen. Maybe I'm being impatient and not
waiting long enough, But I did wait at least an hour.

I would then get frustrated and hold the power button in. I'll try
again tonight before I go to bed and let it run overnight on a system
that has a fresh install of Windows Xp. Plus I'll remove all the
extra stuff like my TV tuner, second hard drive, second optical drive
and of course all the USB stuff.

You shouldn't have to wait more than a few minutes, tops. If you
system doesn't do anything for a hour, then something is wrong,
probably a driver issue. Usually Windows will pop up a blue screen of
death message with a bunch of gibberish in hexademical code. It can't
always do that, depending on what happened.

You normally see something like below:

http://www.rollanet.org/~benm/graphics/bsod.jpg

Sometimes, but not always Windows lists one or more drivers, other
times it just gives a stop code like 00000007B, which frequently means
it stumbled on a driver. This tends to be more annoying than a fatal
flaw. However you do need to fix what caused it. Typically by
disabling the problem device in BIOS or unplugged its data cable and
power supply Windows should get past the hang.

If you have lots of USB stuff, that may be it if they've got their own
old XP drivers. Windows supplies a new generic one that supports a lot
of USB devices. However the rub is you usually got to get Vista up and
running first, then it should by itself do the "found new hardware"
dance and install drivers for it. You can help Windows by not
overwhelming it having it find all kinds of new stuff at once. This
can and does lead to hangs. Best to yank all your unneeded stuff, then
once Vista is up, put them back one at a time. I know, a royal pain in
the butt if you got lots of stuff.

 

[totallygreen]

You shouldn't have to wait more than a few minutes, tops. If you
system doesn't do anything for a hour, then something is wrong,
probably a driver issue. Usually Windows will pop up a blue screen of
death message with a bunch of gibberish in hexademical code. It can't
always do that, depending on what happened.

You normally see something like below:

http://www.rollanet.org/~benm/graphics/bsod.jpg

Sometimes, but not always Windows lists one or more drivers, other
times it just gives a stop code like 00000007B, which frequently means
it stumbled on a driver. This tends to be more annoying than a fatal
flaw. However you do need to fix what caused it. Typically by
disabling the problem device in BIOS or unplugged its data cable and
power supply Windows should get past the hang.

If you have lots of USB stuff, that may be it if they've got their own
old XP drivers. Windows supplies a new generic one that supports a lot
of USB devices. However the rub is you usually got to get Vista up and
running first, then it should by itself do the "found new hardware"
dance and install drivers for it. You can help Windows by not
overwhelming it having it find all kinds of new stuff at once. This
can and does lead to hangs. Best to yank all your unneeded stuff, then
once Vista is up, put them back one at a time. I know, a royal pain in
the butt if you got lots of stuff.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Thanks Adam. I'm going to try again tonight and will report back.

 

[Guest]

Well this Windows Vista should be called Windows codename: Blue Screen
instead. It is so awful starting from the installation, i had the same
problem. Guess how i overcome it. I just run 5 times the installation and it
upgraded. During the 4th time i opened the tray of the DVD after it reboot at
expanding 21% and closed it again later (but before it starts reading it),
but it stuck later. Again with the same trick the fifth time it worked!

All these things with the drivers reminds me of linux...

Nezos

 

[totallygreen]

Well I did finally get Vista installed after I removed my AGP graphics
card, second hard drive, second optical drive, tv tuner and all the
USB stuff.

After Vista was installed, I reinstalled all the hardware and I must
say that everything seems to be working fine. Thanks TG

 

[Guest]

Congrats totallygreen,

you guys seem to be lucky, because at least your Vista does boot and
produces some sort of error message. So it's quite obvious that a driver
issue is the probable cause.

In my case it does not boot at all ("Disk read error"), so I guess it fails
to produce a decent boot sector before trying to reboot.

I really don't think I'm having some driver issue here.

Anyone has an idea??

Mike

 

[totallygreen]

Cosmicray, Some things I noticed as I was installing Vista. My
computer didn't reboot until expanding files reached the 28 percent
mark.

It seems like maybe your computer is rebooting prematurely? Maybe a
memory issue? In the back of my mind I was also thinking that I might
have had memory issues.

Being the impatient type, I just removed one of the memory sticks
along with the other hardware for the install. If you have multiple
memory sticks, maybe try installing Vista with only one stick at a
time? I had seen some posts where that had helped people get the OS
installed. Good Luck. TG

 

[totallygreen]

Sorry for the double post, but just to add...I think it's important to
mention that I was doing a custum install of Vista ultimate. Maybe
different versions of Vista reboot at different stages of expanding
files.

Maybe someone else who has installed one of the other versions can
chime in on at exactly what stage of expanding files their computer
rebooted. TG

 

[Guest]

Hi Totallygreen,

I was thinking about some memory issues as well.
I might try to take out one of the sticks. Any memtests however didn't show
any results. I don't want to do that now, since I presently really need my pc
and with the complete backup I would have to do first and then - after
possible failure - re-installation of the backup it takes for hours .
Another thing:
If I take out part of the memory and successfully install Vista, does it
still work when I put my second GB in again??
It would be pretty ridicoulous if I only get it running if I reduce my RAM
while Vista actually needs more RAM than XP ...

Maybe Microsoft should come up with some sort of patch that solves this
problem!
I wouldn't like the idea that I had to do the same thing in case of a
re-installation ...

But thanks for the good whishes ...

)

Mike

 

[Guest]

Hey folks,

this time I tried something different:
I formatted partition C: so it was completely empty. Then I inserted my
shiny Vista Ultimate DVD and bootet.

This time everything looked a bit different. Expanding continued to 100%
(!!) and everything looked pretty normal and seemed to be completed.

After a while I was told that my PC had to reboot ..... and it didn't work
....!

This time I didn't even get the message "Disk read error". No message at
all. Just a prompt that I had to press any key to boot from Cd/DVD. That of
course started the whole process again.

Then I opted for Repair functions. And a Windows Vista OS was found on my
drive, however I could repair nothing.

So I ended up re-installing my backup of XP and coping with growing
frustration ...

 

[joseph2k]

Hi Totallygreen,

I was thinking about some memory issues as well.
I might try to take out one of the sticks. Any memtests however didn't
show any results. I don't want to do that now, since I presently really
need my pc and with the complete backup I would have to do first and then
- after possible failure - re-installation of the backup it takes for
hours . Another thing:
If I take out part of the memory and successfully install Vista, does it
still work when I put my second GB in again??
It would be pretty ridicoulous if I only get it running if I reduce my RAM
while Vista actually needs more RAM than XP ...

Maybe Microsoft should come up with some sort of patch that solves this
problem!
I wouldn't like the idea that I had to do the same thing in case of a
re-installation ...

But thanks for the good whishes ...

)

Mike

I supect that this is related to the latest versions of memory controllers
that "interleave" or support "128 bit" access (ddr2 240 pin, two dimm).
The installer does not properly support it though the installed OS does.

 

[Guest]

Hello JosephKK,

thanks for your posting. That's the first one that could be really helpful.
Do you think Microsoft is going to issue some fix for that?

Mike

PS:
Gegen Dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst, vergebens!
I like it! Didn't know it was a Schiller quote ...