Topic: Reloading Vista

[grt]

Help

I built my lad a new computer for his gaming and bought Vista OEM .
I installed Vista and have heard nothing but how wonderful it is for weeks .
Then after about 2 months it just stopped working .
Switch on , starts booting and then screen goes black and HDD powers down .

Have tried reinstalling Vista but it gives you the safe start menu , but then says you can't install in safe mode and need to restart computer .
Restart and it gets as far as the scrolling loading bar and then goes black and powers down .

The manual is very helpful - "click on start button and select help and support " .... does anyone else see a problem with that ?

cheers
GRT

[Sandra]

Had you set it to boot from CD/DVD as first device when you tried reinstalling Vista or are you trying to install it from inside Vista ?

[grt]

I worked that one out after a couple of attempts  and have removed some memory as I remember there was a problem installing on more that 2GB memory .
The installation does start now but crashes halfway through extracting files .

[Sandra]

How big is the partition that you are installing Vista on ?

[grt]

The main partition on the hard drive is about 220Gb .
As I say it did install on there originally but then crashed after two months .

[Sandra]

When you get to the where do you want to install part I usually delete any partition that has previously had windows on it, of any version, then create a partition of the same size, for Vista at least 60 gig, then install to that.
There may be bad sectors on the partition that are causing the pc to crash so although it will take longer if you select the Format NTFS Full option, that will scan the disk and hopefully fix any bad sectors.

[grt]

I have deleted all partitions and created one partition for the whole drive .
I have formatted the drive , setup just gave format option , not format types .
Have installed again . Near the end of the installation , after the last action has been ticked , the screen goes black and that is it . Drives are still spinning but even left for a few hours , there is nothing .
Switching off and on again just leads to a message saying woindows cannot start and to reinstall .


 

[Sandra]

Its sounding like the hard drive has a fault.
Have you got another that you could try it on ?

[grt]

I have replaced the hard drive . Whilst rummaging around I discovered that the new motherboard requires a second power input for the PSU fan .
All connected up again . Got a bit further but crashed after the "installing for first time message" .
Have tried with XP and that refused to load a lot of the files and wouldn't boot .
Tried with Ubunutu - error message "MP-BIOS bug :8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC" .

As far as I can make out this is an error that doesnt affect XP or NT so shouldn't affect Vista .
Could this be part of the problem ?
Or have I possibly fried something by not plugging the extra power lead in . This doesn't seem likely as it is still working to start the loading process .

Help
grt

[Sandra]

Its sounding like a corrupt bios with the message youre getting.

Can you flash the bios to the same or a newer bios ?

[grt]

Thanks Sandra

I'll give it a go