Calling all Samaritans - My Extensa 4420-5237 will not complete a Vista Home Premium (retail) installation

This is a laptop without Recovery Discs, where the original drive partitions were erased and reformatted as 1 big partition. During Vista installation, it always reboots just as Vista is on the verge of "Completing Installation". So near and yet so far. The BIOS shows the hard drive as an IDE drive - even though this is clearly a SATA drive. Is this a driver problem? Do I need to load SATA drivers before having Vista go through the installation? Help!

 

I am having a serious problem reinstalling Vista Home Premium on this (4420-5237) laptop. The hard drive partitions had previously been deleted, and the entire drive allocated into a single partition. I am using a retail version of Vista Home Premium, and am getting to the point where Vista says Completing Installation, upon which the laptop reboots before completing the installation. During my attempts to complete the installation and well as reinstalling from the beginning, I have been through dozens of cycles of these reboots even after repartitioning and reformatting the hard drive over and over. Do you have any advice on how I can complete my Vista installation on this laptop?

(My side question is this - do I need a SATA driver to install Vista Home Premium even though the BIOS on my laptop says this is an IDE drive? I have heard mentions on forums that some Vista installations have failed because Vista really needs a SATA driver. If so, could you point me to where I can get it?)

 

I don't think vista needs sata driver. XP does, because it was made long before sata was the new standard in computers and becomes available to everyone.

You should change the settings in your bios from IDE to AHCI (SATA) if your hard disk is SATA, unless you're installing XP.

Maybe (just maybe) your vista installation disc is damaged? I had similar problems recently when I was restoring my laptop (from my recovery discs) where the installation process would freeze either at the end of copying files to hard disk, or when it said the computer will restart. Sometimes it just freezes without any hard disk activity, sometimes I get blue screen of death. Later I found out that my recovery discs are damaged because eventually, the discs became worse, and I cannot even start the recovery process (because the file boot.wim was unreadable from my disc).

 

Unfortunately, my machine doesn't have this option. My BIOS version is 1.18 (the latest one).

I'm using a retail version of Vista Home Premium rather than recovery discs.