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HP Laptop hangs during Vista install [SOLVED]

TL DRTL DR Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
edited July 2009 in Help / Advice Forum
Hi, and as always thank you in advance.
I'm in the process of formatting an HP Pavilion dv9000 for my dad, and every time it gets to the "Completing Installation..." portion of the install, it just hangs forever. Any ideas?

TL DR on

Posts

  • Captain VashCaptain Vash Registered User regular
    edited July 2009
    how long is forever? because as I recall that vista can be a slow beast, even on massively capable systems.
    when I originally installed vista on my newest system I thought for sure it was freezing, a room mate told me to just chill out, so I went out for the day, did some errands, came back and sure thing, vista had booted.

    Captain Vash on
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  • TL DRTL DR Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
    edited July 2009
    Captain Vash wrote: »
    how long is forever? because as I recall that vista can be a slow beast, even on massively capable systems.
    when I originally installed vista on my newest system I thought for sure it was freezing, a room mate told me to just chill out, so I went out for the day, did some errands, came back and sure thing, vista had booted.

    It had been a few (2-3) hours by the time I left. IIRC, Vista was billed as only taking 20 minutes to install, which seems more fitting with my experience. I think the laptop has 2GB RAM.

    TL DR on
  • TL DRTL DR Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
    edited July 2009
    I'm starting to think that it's a driver issue. The laptop uses a SATA II HD interface, and the original HD along with the original Vista discs are lost to the ages. I bet trying Windows 7 would help, since it seems to be way more on top of things with drivers.

    The frustrating thing is that I tried loading drivers on startup, and everything came back with a "no device drivers found" error. :x

    TL DR on
  • ChanusChanus Harbinger of the Spicy Rooster Apocalypse The Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered User, Moderator mod
    edited July 2009
    2GB RAM Is not a whole lot with Vista. You may want to increase that number.

    Shouldn't cause it to freeze on install, but worth considering down the line.

    Chanus on
    Allegedly a voice of reason.
  • Gravy RobberGravy Robber Registered User regular
    edited July 2009
    A google search suggests that the dv9000 uses AHCI to communicate with the SATA drive. Not sure if this is related to your issue, but this can cause some wierdness if you don't have the driver handy during Windows install. You should go into the BIOS and double-check that you have an option labelled AHCI mode. If you do, you may want to try the following:
    1) Find AHCI drivers you can load during Windows install.
    2) Disable AHCI.

    [Addendum]
    Also, you may just want to try running scandisk and ensuring the drive is still good. There's an option when booting off the Vista disk called "System Recovery Options". You can go into that, open a command prompt, and run "chkdsk DriveLetter: /f /r", with DriveLetter being "C:" or whatever the disk is mounted as.

    Gravy Robber on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • TL DRTL DR Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
    edited July 2009
    The drive was bought new for this install. A source of frustration was the fact that BIOS options seemed very limited, with no way to adjust anything related to HD configurations. Anyway, Windows 7 must have had the applicable driver / compatibility, since it worked on the first go. Thanks to everyone who responded!

    TL DR on
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