Help, Vista hangs on install!

I have a Dell Vostro 1700. I have just installed a new 7200rpm hard drive to replace the old 5400rom drive. When installing the Vista OS, everything goes fine till I get to the "completeing installation" stage. It has seemingly hung two thirds of the way through. I have left it for up to an hour and the progress bar has not moved at all. Is there something I am doing wrong?

Thanks

 

John here from Dell headquarters.

The following thread discusses a few fixes for this problem:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=157373&highlight=vista+hangs

It may give you what you need to install this succesfully. Apparently, the Vista install doesn't really like the Intel SATA controller very much.

Let me know if none of those suggestions do the trick for you.

John
Dell Customer Advocate

 

That thread asks you to turn off AHCI, and change to ATA. Take flamenko's benchmark as a matter of fact, huge improvement.

Do this.

1) Make sure the BIOS says the hard disk is set to use AHCI.
2) Load the Vista DVD, and start installation.
3) At the point where it asks you to chose the partition to install Vista on, there will be an option "Load driver".
4) Take out your Vista DVD, and put in your "Drivers and Utilities" DVD in.
5) Click on "Load Driver" now. Browse your "Drivers and Utilities" folder now, and let is search for the driver for the hard-disk.

If it does not find any related driver, go to folder, i386, and then folder 154200. Ask vista to search here. It is the folder with the driver. At least for my Inspiron 1720. I don't see any reason it'll be different for you.

6) Click "Load" or OK or yes or whatver the option is to proceed.
7) It will find the driver, select install.
8) When it has installed the driver, take out your "Drivers and Utilities" DVD, and put the Vista DVD in, and proceed as usual.

It should work seamlessly now!

 

excellent guys. i will give that a go tonight.

 

That process worked for me. But, so did the Changing it from AHCI to ATA. With the latter, I no longer needed too keep any discs around in order too reinstall windows..

 

And with ATA you are not seeing the FULL performance of the disk drive. It is significantly slower in that mode that when in AHCI mode.

Gary

 

Exactly what I said!

 

They are correct, setting it to ATA is only a workaround, as you don't get full performance of the drive. If Silas' suggestion works, it will allow you to get full performance out of your machine.

 

Well maybe not! It appears that maybe SATA's real benefit is NOT the speed of the interface at all. See this thread:

SATA Discussion

So if you are trying to install an OS on a "virgin" drive, you might be just as well off turning off ATA mode in the BIOS. (Some of us can't do that as SONY has a severely crippled BIOS on the FZ series.)

I am trying to find out if there REALLY is any SATA benefit on a laptop. But from the sounds of Jalf's comment there may not be at all.

Gary

 

In a laptop, the only benefit I can see to having a SATA drive is increased performance through its slightly higher throughput and Native Command Queuing. It does increase performance somewhat, but in most environments it would be barely noticeable.