Vista won't boot correctly

[Guest]

I'm on my 4th install by different methods and the same thing happens each
time....

During the installation, when it gets to "Completing Installation" and
reboots, the screen hangs at "Windows 2006" and eventually all the drive
activity stops (left it for 90 mins - still nothing).

When I try to reboot the same happens - however, if I press F8 and choose
"Last known good" I can access Vista - but if I try anything that needs a
reboot, it's back to the same black screen.

Any advice?
Thanks

 

[droid]

try the install again all over, when it hangs again, reboot *but be sure to
boot into previous os XP or whatever*. Make sure it doesn't try booting
vista again after the hang.

then:

change folder options to make hidden folders visible before the search.

search all partitions (may not be visible! -> diskmgmt.msc -> assign drive
letter) for .log files. The interesting log files are 4 to 30 MB in size,
sometimes at vista partitions windows\inf directory if the setup went that
far. Submit these logs to microsoft using Beta Client.

*If there was no vista partition in diskmgmt.msc* then the log files are
most likely in the same drive your previous OS was installed (if it had
space for the setup files). There should be a hidden, weird named folder, in
root of the volume and the logs are somewhere under there (search).

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your very detailed response.
I've found a log in the inf directory that ends with "Exit status: failure"
so I guess that's the important one and I'll send it off.

 

[Guest]

Hi,
I've been having the same problem as you have. To overcome it, you must load
vista using 'last known good configuration', open up device manager and
update the n-vidia video card drivers to v87.45. You can get these of
n-vidia's website. They where origionally intended for 5308, but seem to
correct the hang in beta 2, or at least it did on my pc.
If you don't have an n-vidia graphics card, i'm afraid this won't solve the
problem.
Hope this helps.
Mike G

 

[droid]

There was just one log?

If it was a driver crash there should be 2 logs:
setupapi.app.log
setupapi.dev.log

The last 20 lines in the ....dev.log tell you in human readable way often
what piece of hardware was it, in the case it was driver crash.