Vista install crashes

Supernova

Hi,

Partner's 7 year old Acer Core2Duo 2GHz 2Gb RAM machine was crashing with HDD errors so have reformatted and chckdsk'd partitions and attempting to reinstall Vista Home Premium.

The install copies and expands files, installs features/updates then reboots.

The Completing Installation part gets part of the way and crashes with a generic I/O error 0xC0000185.

I have read that Vista installs can crash like this due to BIOS settings or other problems and not necessarily because of a bad hard disk.

Is it worth getting another hard disk and trying again or is this symptomatic of other problems? The machine was adequate for what she needs so buying another one might be an unnecessary expense.

Ta!
S

Supernova

Never mind, I re-did the partitions and proved that I could get as far as a complete Windows install before the disk started crashing again, so got a new disk and started afresh.

Cheers
S

tavernman

Supernova wrote: »

Never mind, I re-did the partitions and proved that I could get as far as a complete Windows install before the disk started crashing again, so got a new disk and started afresh.

Cheers
S

Pretty good without feedback, well done:T

NiftyDigits

What the model number of this machine?

paddyrg

Supernova, sounds like the machine is aging, you may find other components starting to give up soon as well - I had an old workhorse desktop that lost a hard drive (replaced), USB ports failed one at a time, optical drive gave up, then still limping along, replacement hard drive started coughing. Replaced it with a laptop, it was very much a case of diminishing returns!

Supernova

NiftyDigits wrote: »

What the model number of this machine?

It's a 5920G

Supernova

tavernman wrote: »

Pretty good without feedback, well done:T

Thanks, took a day to reinstall Windows a few times but then a mere £36 for a bigger hard drive at PC World was inevitable :-)

Supernova

paddyrg wrote: »

Supernova, sounds like the machine is aging, you may find other components starting to give up soon as well - I had an old workhorse desktop that lost a hard drive (replaced), USB ports failed one at a time, optical drive gave up, then still limping along, replacement hard drive started coughing. Replaced it with a laptop, it was very much a case of diminishing returns!

I'm gobsmacked that the machine is still going, especially as it is a laptop. No sign of components failing yet but we shall see ;-)

Fightsback

Supernova wrote: »

I'm gobsmacked that the machine is still going, especially as it is a laptop. No sign of components failing yet but we shall see ;-)

Erm your HDD component failed, one to watch is the fan and airducts.