Vista hanging during install on 1720

Hey everyone,

I just got my inspiron 1720 from the outlet last week and have not been very happy with it. Pretty much immediately it seemed to stutter, almost like how you stutter if you are having packet loss while gaming (3-4 second spikes of doing nothing), and while i was watching the cpu and memory usage it wasnt seeming to spike at all.

So today i decided i was going to blow away the recovery and mediadirect partitions and do a clean vista install and start from scratch and see if that would alleviate the situation, well i cant even get vista up and running.

After wiping the partitions and creating a single partition i started my Vista install, all goes well through the Copying Windows files/Expanding files/Installing features/Installing updates, then it reboots to the "Preparing to run Windows for the first time" message, then it gets to the "Completing instalation" phase, the LCD blinks on and off initializing the video drivers being installed, goes on a few more minutes and then all disk activity pretty much stops, a small blink here and there.

I've waited on it over an hour, one of the times it eventually went to an all black screen with a cursor that i could move with the touchpad, the Wi-Fi shows active, but it never has finished the install.

I did some online chat with a hardware guy on the Dell site today and we ran all the diagnostic tools and everything checked out fine so he referred me to software support. 45 mins into the call with the software guy where he just had me format the drive and run a fresh install he says "sir i can't hear you are you there" and ends up hanging up, without a call back.

So im pretty much at wits end, as i type its sitting here with no drive activity at "Completing installation"

Any ideas?

 

Did you use the Media Direct method of doing a clean install? Or are you ditching MD period?

 

I had the same thing happen, the HD died. I reformatted the whole thing as well and same thing.

I called to get a new computer, replacement. And I asked for a Seagate instead of the WD1200bevs.

 

Ditching everything, been running the symptom tree diagnostics on the HDD today, we shall see what they find.

 

I cant remember the exact routine but the screen that has the option to reformat the drive i believe somewhere is the option to install drivers. Put in your dell drivers cd and install the sata driver or whatever it is. it'll be the only one thats available anyway. So do that then continue with the vista install and you will be fine.

 

i didnt recieve a driver disc, just the vista os disc, the media direct disc, and the webcam drivers and utilities disc.

 

Sounds like something they mentioned on the links in the bottom of this post. I had an issue with an Iastor popping up in the event viewer and my laptop freezing for 30 secs off and on.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/230827-32-device-iastor0-respond-vista-raid-woes

 

try to load AHCI driver before vista starts installation.

 

none of my discs have the SATA driver :| and the one from the dell site doesnt seem to be recognized

 

seems like changing hdd mode to ata instead of ahci remedys the problem, whill this cause longterm issues?

 

I have the same problem. I had to talk to dell support for 1.5 hrs. No use. Any way to fix this ?

Its unfortunate. The system is brand new and I got it 3 hrs back !

Subbu