Hoping for some help

I am at the end of my rope... Its a Dell Inspiron 1720. Having problems with it. Did a system restore still vista was acting horrible. I wiped the drive and did a fresh install.

Here are the issues:

Dell copy of Vista locks up on installation every time.

Friends copy of vista gets through installation but blue screens and instant reboot as soon as it tries to go to desktop post-installation. So I cannot read the error on the blue screen.

Other thing that is weird, even with something like super fdisk every time I format it takes about 10 seconds. Usually formatting 100 gigs takes about 30 min- 1 hour.

Any suggestions would be grand....

Walter

 

Any problems with HDD?You did format it during installation right?

 

Hmm, I would suggest trying a boot disk such as Hiren's and doing some diagnostics on the hdd, ram, overall system, then using one of its utilities to format it.

 

try downloading the GParted LiveCd and format the drive from there
Gparted is pretty much fool-proof

 

The hard drive might be bad. Is it still under warranty?

 

Thanks for the fast replies guys. I am thinking its the HDD or RAM. I have a couple pics here:






1 Update. It did make into vista once. I rebooted and back to the same blue screen and instant reboot.

also i'll try gparted.

 

Someone mentioned RAM. Unseat and reseat. If that does not work try each stick individually.

 

I think I have received similar codes. As powerpack said, re-seat the ram, then test using memtest, and if an error occurs after a couple loops of testing, tests the each stick individually.

 

0x0000007b refers to INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE (do a quick google on it). I'd say the hard drive is probably dying.

 

Try running some of the hardware monitoring utilities listed under "resource monitors" on the Best Free Software for Windows thread. You should be able to run a SMART test on the hdd to diagnose its health.