Vista Business won't load on new machine

A

Albright.Brian

I just built a new machine, (E6600, 4GB ram, 2x250GB hard drives,
geForce 7900GS). I built it, installed XP pro, and got it up and
running on one of the drives. I also have a copy of Vista business
laying around, and I wanted to install it on the other hard drive to
play around with. So I toss the DVD into the drive, and tell it to
boot from it. After it goes through the loading config files, and
then that little scrolly bar when vista is loaded, the blue curtain
screen comes up, and remains blank forever (forever being from
9am-6pm). I'm wondering what I can do, or what needs to be done to
get Vista on this machine.

For visual reference, it freezes at the third picture from this
guide : http://vistabusiness.windowsreinstall.com/installnewhdd/installnewhdd.htm

I ran the vista upgrade advisor on my xp partition, and since the only
software I installed so far is partition magic (which is not vista
compatable ><) that is the only warning that the upgrade advisor gave.

The hard drives are 2 year old maxtor SATA's. I don't know if it
matters, I heard someone mention vista requires some magic pixie dust
on your hard drive or something.

Any advice?
 
C

Carey Frisch [MVP]

You have to reformat the target partition when
prompted to do so during Vista's setup phase.

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User

---------------------------------------------------------------------------­-----


I just built a new machine, (E6600, 4GB ram, 2x250GB hard drives,
geForce 7900GS). I built it, installed XP pro, and got it up and
running on one of the drives. I also have a copy of Vista business
laying around, and I wanted to install it on the other hard drive to
play around with. So I toss the DVD into the drive, and tell it to
boot from it. After it goes through the loading config files, and
then that little scrolly bar when vista is loaded, the blue curtain
screen comes up, and remains blank forever (forever being from
9am-6pm). I'm wondering what I can do, or what needs to be done to
get Vista on this machine.

For visual reference, it freezes at the third picture from this
guide : http://vistabusiness.windowsreinstall.com/installnewhdd/installnewhdd.htm

I ran the vista upgrade advisor on my xp partition, and since the only
software I installed so far is partition magic (which is not vista
compatable ><) that is the only warning that the upgrade advisor gave.

The hard drives are 2 year old maxtor SATA's. I don't know if it
matters, I heard someone mention vista requires some magic pixie dust
on your hard drive or something.

Any advice?
 
A

Adam Albright

I just built a new machine, (E6600, 4GB ram, 2x250GB hard drives,
geForce 7900GS). I built it, installed XP pro, and got it up and
running on one of the drives. I also have a copy of Vista business
laying around, and I wanted to install it on the other hard drive to
play around with. So I toss the DVD into the drive, and tell it to
boot from it. After it goes through the loading config files, and
then that little scrolly bar when vista is loaded, the blue curtain
screen comes up, and remains blank forever (forever being from
9am-6pm). I'm wondering what I can do, or what needs to be done to
get Vista on this machine.

For visual reference, it freezes at the third picture from this
guide : http://vistabusiness.windowsreinstall.com/installnewhdd/installnewhdd.htm

I ran the vista upgrade advisor on my xp partition, and since the only
software I installed so far is partition magic (which is not vista
compatable ><) that is the only warning that the upgrade advisor gave.

The hard drives are 2 year old maxtor SATA's. I don't know if it
matters, I heard someone mention vista requires some magic pixie dust
on your hard drive or something.

Any advice?

If you want to have BOTH XP and Vista on the same computer you need to
be able to dual boot. That just means you're presented with a menu
choice when you first turn the computer on where you select to boot
into XP or Vista or some other OS.

I didn't bother to read the article, just the first page that came up
on the topic in a Google Search. There are countless such how-to
pages. Just taking a quick looks seems like a decent how-to.

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6157570.html
 
A

Albright.Brian

If you want to have BOTH XP and Vista on the same computer you need to
be able to dual boot. That just means you're presented with a menu
choice when you first turn the computer on where you select to boot
into XP or Vista or some other OS.

I didn't bother to read the article, just the first page that came up
on the topic in a Google Search. There are countless such how-to
pages. Just taking a quick looks seems like a decent how-to.

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6157570.html

Thanks for the link. However, the setup never gets to the point in
which I am able to select anything from any menu. After it loads
configuration files, the background changes to the vista setup
background, but no menu's appear. I am not given any options for
anything.
 
T

Tim Judd

I just built a new machine, (E6600, 4GB ram, 2x250GB hard drives,
geForce 7900GS). I built it, installed XP pro, and got it up and
running on one of the drives. I also have a copy of Vista business
laying around, and I wanted to install it on the other hard drive to
play around with. So I toss the DVD into the drive, and tell it to
boot from it. After it goes through the loading config files, and
then that little scrolly bar when vista is loaded, the blue curtain
screen comes up, and remains blank forever (forever being from
9am-6pm). I'm wondering what I can do, or what needs to be done to
get Vista on this machine.

For visual reference, it freezes at the third picture from this
guide : http://vistabusiness.windowsreinstall.com/installnewhdd/installnewhdd.htm

I ran the vista upgrade advisor on my xp partition, and since the only
software I installed so far is partition magic (which is not vista
compatable ><) that is the only warning that the upgrade advisor gave.

The hard drives are 2 year old maxtor SATA's. I don't know if it
matters, I heard someone mention vista requires some magic pixie dust
on your hard drive or something.

Any advice?

my suggestion is to make sure the BIOS isn't configuring your 2x250G
SATA drives as a single RAID array.

2nd suggestion, if the first one is answered as two individual drives,
is to delete any/all partitions on the 2nd SATA drive where you want
Vista from XP. Leave the drive 'blank' and then restart/rerun the Vista
install DVD.

I wish you luck
 

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