Vista Installation fails at the last minute

[vande341]

I have a Dell XPS 410 that came with Vista Home Premium installed and it's been a great computer. Then I messed it up bad and now Vista won't install. Heres what happened.

I bought a new internal hard drive and was installing it. Because I'm dumb I elected to make RAID configuration, which made both the old hard drive and new hard drive effectively blank, I think.

I have since removed the RAID configuration but that didnt help my problem. I was able to recover the data off my HDD seperately, and I did a clean hard format. Since then, I've tried to use my restore CDs to install Vista, and the installation works great til the very end.

After restarting, it says "wait while vista prepares to start for the first time", and then it goes to the final installation screen and says "finishing installaton"...and it stays for a while, and then the screen has a small gray box pop up for a quick half second and everything goes black. The monitor light even goes from green to orange. It just ends there.

I've tried it on 3 different hard drives and put the hard drives in different slots but theres been no luck. I even shut off the RAID controller altogether. I can't seem to find anyone whos had this problem, and my techy buddy is baffled too. Any ideas?

 

[rive0108]

This issue has been reported by other XPS 410 users and is a result of your changing the RAID settings.

Try this:
Go into BIOS and change the setting from "Raid off/Raid On" to "Raid Autodetect" to get Vista up and running.


"Is your Raid set to "on" in your Dell BIOS? Did you buy a retail version of Win Vista? If the answer to both of those is yes (and you didnt change your BIOS from Raid on to autodetect) then I am very surprised you got Vista to load without taking any further measures! I DONT have a raid array, however, the factory default setting from dell in the BIOS is raid on and it is this very issue that causes the BIG problem for a number of users, including myself. Fortunately, my situation is resolved now (by changing my BIOS setting).
I have discussed this issue with a number of other Dell users on the Dell forums. My system is a Dell XPS 410 (one step down from yours) but still a high end system with Raid technology. It was a MAJOR problem for me to try to install the retail version of Vista on my Dell. It was only when I went into the BIOS and changed the setting from Raid On to Raid Autodetect that I could get Vista up and running. One of the big problems is Vista setup DOES NOT tell you specifically what the problem is, only that it needs driver(s) during setup. Then when you click continue, you get the BSOD (blue screen of death)."

posted from:http://social.technet.microsoft.com.../thread/525b3eaa-ae89-4e67-bdf1-4a60d5f6d53d/