is the Vista installation hanging or working?

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Guest

We've gone through the process of downloading Vista to upgrade an XP system.
Everything seems to have gone on smoothly. The initial download of the
2.38gb file took a long time, but it is here now.

As the setup or upgrade has been working, we are now staring at a screen
that looks like a Vista background...and the words:

"Updating Windows"

are displayed. The computer has been like this for over 3 hours.
Do we just need to be patient and let Vista do its trick? Or is it hung in
a place that indicates it is not?
Thank you anyone who considers this question.
David in Atlanta
 
Is there any apparent activity, either HD activity lights or animation on
the screen? If so, I would say let it go. 3 hours is a long time but I've
heard of longer, even 4 hours from one. My experience is that it usually
isn't hung but is in fact "doing a lot".
 
Hi Leroux
the onscreen activity has the cursor shaped like an hourglass, indicating
that we should wait.

the hard drive might have some activity. it seems that this system does not
have an activity light.

We have not gone past the 4 hour mark...and wait patiently.

Are we errant fools? please advise. thank you much!
 
If it's quiet enough, you might be able to hear the hard disk activity.
Other than wait longer, I can't offer much.

Would you describe this system as either a marginal performer or was it
heavily loaded with data and applications?
 
Hi again
I wouldn't consider the system marginal. There is a 15gb of storage, a gb of
ram, and a reasonably fast processor at 2.8ghz
It has now churned for over 10 hours.

Is it reasonable for us to remain patient? Does the upgrade take this long
(aka, it will take that long for future upgraders)?

The same screen is present, and the hard drive seems to have some activity.
Thoughts?
see you all in the morning.
thanks
David
 
please let me clarify...there was around 15gb of available storage on the C
drive
and then there is 70gb of another drive (E)
 
Back again LaRoux
The computer has been churning for 23 hours now...the good news is that
there seems to be progress. Now it says "Expanding Files 21%... "
and there is a progress bar along the bottom of the window.

Wild, I would never have bet that the upgrade from a fully functioning XP
system to Vista would take 24 hours or longer...but that is what is
happening.

So, patience is winning...Vista might be installing.
Thoughts?
D
 
still waiting after 30 hours...hard drive blinking, this is stupid.
Why do we not all switch to Macintosh?
 
I guess this is another example of the "WOW" for Vista. You definitely have
the new record. I suppose it's possible that others would have taken this
long too but they lost patience and rebooted.

I can think of a couple of things that might cause an extraordinary delay.
If your existing structures on the C: drive are damaged, it's possible that
you are generating a ton of errors copying files and such. A CHKDSK /F may
fix this up once everything is complete. Second would be some sort of
physical media problems with the hard drive. It's possible that you have
either a bunch of soft errors that are being corrected or hard errors that
are causing retries and remappings. This seems somewhat less likely. Third
and most likely would be that the existing files are highly fragmented and
moving them around to do the install is causing a lot of delay. This is made
more significant since you only have the minimum free space to maneuver in.

Let us know what the end result is!
 
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