Reinstalling Vista

Payless_2

I am having problems reinstalling Vista on my laptop Everytime I try it ends up with a black screen that tells me to restart as installation has failed.

The first time that I tried to reinstall it got to the point where it said completing installation and then the laptop just crashed. If possible I would like to keep my documents.

Can you give me any advice on how to manage this?

rhythmsoup

Hi, You can try this technique to recover your data before you attempt another install

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=2359753

Payless_2

Thanks rhythmsoup but there is nothing that has not already been backed up now apparently. The problem is that a repairman installed a new hard drive with a temporary version of vista installed. He did this because he said that the old hard drive had been corrupted with a virus and it was impossible to get rid of it. Now, 2 weeks later this version of vista has expired and he wants another £30 to put our version on.

Consequently we tried to load it ourselves from the valid disc that was supplied with the laptop. I think the problem may be that the first version was partitioned (is that the correct term). Anyway when the laptop is switched on it asks us which version of windows we want to start it with and there are about 5 windows vistas listed. One of these is probably the temporary installation and the rest are likely to be aborted reinstallation attempts.

Would the best bet be to completely wipe the disc and if so how do I do this?

rhythmsoup

Hi, it does indeed sound to me like the different versions have installed into their own paritions and even if you boot sucessfully you'll end up with lot of paritions when all you want is one single disc or maybe two partitions at the most.

If you have a valid install disc, then I would use that to re-install the Operating System. Usually when you install MS Windows you have an option to delete any existing paritions and just use the entire disc, I havent setup Vista unfortunately but if the install process is very much the same as XP then the option to format any partitions will be available.

The other option is to use the "live" cd in my other post, and use one of the applications on there to clean up the partitions off your hard drive so you can start fresh with the install.

As a side note, I had a friend who had a fairly good spec Laptop with Vista and to cut a long story short they installed Ubuntu instead and have been using it since successfully. Depending on what you need your PC for you may be just as well off giving Ubuntu a try, just a thought

Payless_2

It won't even allow us to install windows vista anymore now so I think we are going to have to wipe the sdisc. It just keeps going round in circles between choosing operating systems