valleydoofer said:
install again but unfortunately got the same issue. After you press any
key
to boot from the DVD then get the green scrolling bar for the start of
setup
that is right were it crashes.
Bugger! Oh well, it was worth a shot ...
The fact setup still crashes, is interesting diagnostic info in its own
right.
The strange thing is my motherboard, RAM and
CPU are all pretty much brand new, I bought them all three months ago in
anticipation of Vista's release.
In my experience, major hardware problems or incompatibilities will show up
right away; they're not so much a function of the age of the hardware (you
know how MTTF is high right at the beginning, goes really low for most of
the lifecycle, then climbs sharply at the end of the lifecycle?)
I did run a chkdsk before installing Vista aswell and no errors were
reported.
Makes me wonder if it could potentially be bad media. I did download it
from Technet so maybe the ISO could have been corrupted during download or
through the burning process?
Yes, that is very possible. I had a bad DVD which I'd downloaded from MSDN,
turned out to be a flaky burn (grrr, death to Nero). I don't remember the
exact error, but I lost a night chasing it. I've heard of other folks having
weird errors with burnt install media, too.
As Vista setup runs, it logs information to a file called setupact.log. This
is a plain text file which can be opened with Notepad, etc. During the early
stages of setup, this file is kept in the directory
$Windows.~BT\Sources\Panther, on the C: drive (ie,
C:\$Windows.~BT\Sources\Panther\Setupact.log). After Setup reaches its
later stages, the file is moved to %WINDIR%\panther. This is where you will
find it, if/when your Vista setup ever completes successfully. To find out
why your setup crashes, you can try to inspect this file from a Command
Prompt:
- After setup crashes, reboot the machine from the Vista DVD.
- Choose the option to repair the machine, rather than going to Vista Setup.
- Under the Repair options, open a Command Prompt.
- type "notepad C:\$Windows.~BT\Sources\Panther\Setupact.log"
- Scroll to the bottom of the Setupact.log file to see what Setup's last
operations were, before it stopped doing its thing.
The error messages you find here may hopefully give you a clue about what is
failing; or at least what happened immediately prior to the failure (some
temporal association to causality?).
If Vista crashes even just going to a command prompt, then there's a very
fundamental problem. If that case, I'd suggest burning a new DVD from the
ISO image, taking all the precautions you can for a successful burn (eg burn
at slow speed, quiesce any other applications, select the "verify" option if
your burning app has one, etc etc). Then try Vista setup again.
Let us know how you get on.
Andrew
