I have exactly same problem. Everything worked fine up till the "completing
installation" stage. I burned a DVD, installed from the drive into an
external harddrive's primary logical partition. All the Vista folders/files
look likes they are there when I browse to that folder. When the system
reboots the second time, it wants to install to that same directory where
the files are already located. No other choices are available. The
installation doesn't know where it left off at that point. I thought about
trying to have a dual boot open up into that Vista partition to perhaps
finish the process off but haven't wanted to mess quite yet with the new
boot system files and end up losing references to my current XP boot
partition on my C drive. As we know, boot.ini is now a legacy mechanism.
The only other idea I can think of is to move all the files from the logical
drives (D:,E
onto the external hard drive to free up enough space on my
primary bootable hard disk and and maybe the DVD with ISO will like that
better. Greg Hazzard