Installation does not start from Factory DVD - Vista

Greetings,

I used the Acer empowering utility to create the factory default DVDs. They worked fine when I re-installed Vista last year year.

Yesterday I had to re-install vista again using the DVD. It starts up and I see a message "Loading RAMDISK image" and a progress bar. When the bar reaches 100%, nothing happens, there is nothing on the screen, and the install seems to hang.

Any ideas?

Thank you.

 

Scratched disks? Have you made any partition changes or anything like that?

 

No, the discs are still brand new. And no partition changes.

I had some sort of virus that would not let me start any kind of Anti-Virus program (I had Symantec that came with ACER). So I decided to boot in Safe mode. After I changed the boot option in MS Config, Vista would not boot up, I just had a blank screen.

Alt-F10 does not work either, and now the DVD does not seem to work.

Not sure what to do any more?

 

Ok found what the problem was. I had upgraded my RAM to 4 GB and for some reason neither XP nor Vista installation liked that. So I put back in the the original RAM and the intallation works.

Another problem developed though. I had 2 partitions on my HD, and when I tried to install XP the D: partition became C: and when I installed Vista, it installed on D instead of C, and now it is installed properly but it does not boot.

How can I make C as partition 2 and D as partition 1? I mean make C back to D and D back to C?

I tried from the ACER recovery but it always installs on Disk 0 partition 2.
I'm assuming it should go on partition 1?

Thanks.

 

Um, not sure, unfortunately the Acer restore DVD's do seem to be a finiky, do you still have the restore partition? In theory you should be able to restore from that, what I would do (if it was my computer) was wipe the hard drive completely (erase all partitions) that way it'll just create new partitions where required.

However, it depends if you are happy to lose the restore partition (assuming you still have it).

 

Yes I have it, and just installed from it, same result. Somehow the boot partition is not well and I am trying to find a utility to help me manage it.

 

I'm trying to avoid wiping out that partition until I find out if I can re-create it.

 

Alright, I'm back in business, I'm so proud of myself

I used BartPE and a utility called TestDrive or some such. Factory Partition is there, and my files, and music in good shape. It took almost a week of evening testing and re-booting.

Thanks to all who helped, especially Arla and Smurfjet