Installing Vista Ultimate

Does anyone know which Socket A Athlon XP motherboards will install Vista Ultimate? I have had this OS for a while and I want to install it on a test PC. I have a ton of Athlon XP parts. I need to find a compatible motherboard. I run XP Pro SP-2 on my PC's, but none of my motherboards will take Vista. And yes my hardware is all passing the Vista test. I use ATI X1600 512MB video cards and 2GB RAM and all HD's are a minimum of 500GB.

Yes, it works fine
//Danne

Help Diizzy!! I have two motherboards that both stick at the press any key to boot from cd after installing setup. One is an Abit KG7 Raid and the other is an MSI 6380E ARU Raid. I am stumped. Never have been unable to install OS on any PC before.

Are the hard drives clean/formated? If not wipe and formate then try to install. Also try to install with just 1 stick of ram, after install add ram .

Do you get the "press any key to boot message" on screen or does it fail just before that.

I always zero fill my hard drives before formating them. The trip is that I put in the Vista DVD and reboot the PC. I then hit "enter" upon prompt, and then Vista comes up and I do the custom install, and enter the key and then it goes through the setup. Then it says the usual thing about it will reboot in a few seconds. When it reboots, it comes back up to the press any key to boot from cd prompt. Normally you ignore that and it then continues to boot up to the OS and happily installs it. No dice here. It stays at the promt. If I do hit a key, it will do the entire setup again and do the same thing. I did it four times in a row the first time I tried the installation. I never have had a problem installing it on other peoples PC's. Mine is the first Socket A raid I tried it on.

Hi new to the forums and have had this happen one before check in the boot sequence and see if the second boot device is the hard drive and if it isn't that may be the problem I had one set and the rest of the boot sequence was disabled so were did the system no to boot to the DVD rom which was the first boot check it out it may be your problem to and good Luck.

My boot sequence is CD, HD 0, HD 1.

I had this once during a system load I was trying to do.

For a quick test, try booting from the CD with no HDD installed. If this passes and then complains that it is unable to find a HDD (you will have gon through produt key etc which you cant do at present) then there is something on the drive that Vista boot loader does not like.

When I got this I had to setup a partition on the drive before Vista would install. Once I had got passed the bootup and had to choose the drive to install onto I could erase and re-partition it as needed.

When it get to the point of what hard drive you want to install on click drive options advanced ,and do a full format not a quick from within Vista install that helps one install I had doing the smae loop like yours is doing it may or may not help. Good Luck

There is no full format option from within vista install (xp yea sure but vista)

Actually when I run setup on Vista, I do put in the key. It is after it finishes setup and reboots that I then get the press any key to boot from cd and it stays stuck there forever. If I do hit a key, it will do the setup all over again. I also tried it without putting the key in and uncheck the box that says to automatically activate online when finished. Both of my Socket A PC's do this. Both with an AMD XP 2400+ CPU and 2GB RAM. One is an Abit and the other one is an MSI. Both are raid and raid is disabled. Each time it does this, I format the HD and try again. I have tried several sizes of HD ranging from 160GB to 500GB. Seagate, Western Digital, and Maxtor. Zero filling before each format does not help. I have even removed all cards and devices except for the video card. Both video cards are Vista ready ATI 256MB DVI. One is Radeon 9550 and the other is Radeon X1600.

I should add that there is a format option in Vista. I tried it and it did not help. After you hit install now, the next screen disables the upgrade option, and below are options to click on the format or load drivers for raid installs and network installs etc.

Stupid thought does Vista need to install on both drive because of your raid setup before it will finish,maybe that is the "it just installs again" that is happening?

I have raid disabled. I am using only one drive set a s an IDE0 master and the DVD burner is set as an IDE1 master. No matter how many bootable OS HD's I use, I always do the install using one drive as a master. Each of my PC's is dual boot when running.

Since no one else has suggested another option and since you say you dual boot when your systems are up and running. I will ask, have you tried installing XP first and then installing Vista from within XP on another drive and dual booting. This way you will see if you can get past the ( press any key to boot from cd) doing the install for the dual boot this way. I had XP give a problem like this once and it was hidden files on the drive that was stopping the install we found it by putting the drive in as a slave and looking for files on the drive and low and behold, there were files hidden. So we deleted and formated the drive with WD tool and the install went clean and simple not saying this is your problem.

Yes indeed, I tried doing the Vista upgrade from Windows XP and the same result happened. After setup ran and the computer reboots, it stays stuck at the black screen that says press any key to boot from cd. I am going to try installing Vista Business this weekend. After running Vista advisor, it says I should be able to run Vista Business(thet was their suggested version). But the motherboard is not listed with the hardware and software drivers. I shall see what happens.

You can try to install vista, and then go back in to the Vista installer (via DVD) and just after picking your language, choose repair. To me it sounds like a problem with the Vista boot loader.

Also make sure that after the computer reboots, you do not have any USB devices plugged in, or any Discs in the drive(s). Even if you do not have the boot order setup for USB some computers will hang for a very long time if a USB device can not initialize. Also reset your BIOS to "factory defaults" if the setting is availiable.

You could also install Vista on another PC and then insert the HDD in your other PC (this is annoying as it will require you to activate it because more than 3 hardware items changed).

Anyway those are the 2 things I would try next. Also if you are comfortable updating your BIOS, that never hurts.

The latest BIOS is 2003 for all three PC's, which I installed long ago. No Vista drivers are available from the chipset manufacturer for either PC. I have no PCI cards or USB devices installed during the Vista install attempts. I can clone a HD from another PC, but it would not be my own PC. If I need to, I will simply get another motherboard and use one my empty towers. I was hoping to avoid getting another motherboard until the next generation of CPU's come out in a year or so. I did try the repair after about 15 installation attempts and it said that no problem could be found.

I finally figured it out. I had a hunch, and decided to use Vista partition the H.D. at installation. I deleted the partition and then added the partition, and Vista installed fine. I had used Acronis. I even tried my old Partition Magic. You would think that when I ran repair after a few failed installs, Vista would have mentioned that it did not like the way the partition was created. It always kept saying that there was no apparent problem. Never an error message. I always used NTFS partion, so I do not know why this quirk exists. So now I know to always use Vista create the partition before each install. Thanks for the help.

That's because it's an updated version of NTFS, Old partition programs will just cause a corrupt disc in vista because they see NTFS but it's not really it's the newer version and they cant write it, So if you use an older program to format the disc vista will poop itself