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vista doesn't install, but ubuntu does

aperlscriptaperlscript Registered User regular
edited March 2011 in Help / Advice Forum
I have a friend's 4-year-old Dell Inspiron that got pwned. I don't know the extent of the damage, and don't really care, I'm going straight to Fukushima with it.

However, when I tried a clean Vista install (both from the Dell-provided Vista disc, as well as a real retail box), it never was able to make it into the first-time boot from the HDD. The installation (booted off the DVD) would finish, the system would reboot into the fresh install, but then would briefly BSOD before rebooting. The laptop does this forever. Booting into safe mode shows crcdisk.sys as the last driver loaded, which smells like hard drive failure.

Just for shits and giggles, I installed Ubuntu on the machine, and lo and behold, there's no problem at all.

Is there any reason to suspect a Windows 7 install would fare any better than Vista?
What about WinXP?
Is there malware these days that can brick an hdd to the point where NTFS will never work on it?

aperlscript on

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    matt has a problemmatt has a problem Points to 'off' Points to 'on'Registered User regular
    edited March 2011
    Anecdotal, but the PC I use at home, I was never able to install Vista on. The install would complete, it would boot into the OS, give me the Vista logo, then the screen would go black and never come back. No manner of tweaking and fiddling got it to work. Switching video cards, updating motherboard BIOS, unplugging and replugging drives in the PC, nothing. Later when I installed Win7, it worked flawlessly on the same hardware setup that Vista failed on.

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    DoctorArchDoctorArch Curmudgeon Registered User regular
    edited March 2011
    Was the hdd formated before you reinstalled Vista? I know you said "clean install" but it always pays to double check.

    The post above me raises an excellent point. Vista is garbage.

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    aperlscriptaperlscript Registered User regular
    edited March 2011
    DoctorArch wrote: »
    Was the hdd formated before you reinstalled Vista? I know you said "clean install" but it always pays to double check.
    Yes, the laptop was running Vista with a stock Dell config, a big 140G C: drive and a 10G "recovery drive". During the install, I blew away both of these partitions and reformatted the whole drive as one big drive.
    The post above me raises an excellent point. Vista is garbage.
    No doubt about that.

    aperlscript on
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