Installation - Expanding files 21%

Frustrating, disappointing, slow, and plain bad are a few words I'd use to
descibe MY experience with Vista thus far.

My recent foray after testing Vista with Virtual PC was to upgrade my home
system.

I proceeded cautiously. As a Microsoft Certified Professional and Microsoft
Small Business Specialist, I know that is a must. Who really knows what is
going to happen? Microsoft certainly doesn't.

Anyway, I ran the Vista Advisor to be sure that my system was upgradable.
All checks came back OK with a couple of warnings stating that I should visit
WindowsUpdate after the upgrade. As stated by the Windows Vista Upgrade
Advisor, "Your computer can run Windows Vista". So I started the upgrade.

At Expanding Files 21% after a reboot, the system simply frooze. No error
message. I had to hard reset the PC.

So now I've scoured the internet and newsgroups, and I've found no solution.
Surely, there is a solution other than wiping the PC clean. But who knows?

--
John Olinger
DELTYME

Hi John,

Could be a number of things. Some RC burns had issues if they were done at
high speed, so caused errors during setup. Could be faulty memory or the
hard disk seized. What happens if you restart with the DVD? and without it?
Is the drive intact?

Hopefully, as a professional, you made a proper backup prior to the upgrade
attempt. You may be stuck with restoring it.

Yes, all important data is backed up to external HDD and DVD.

So, I've been content to install a clean Vista. But now, it doesn't get
past expanding files 0%.

Hard drive is IDE/ATA. Shuttle ST62K, P4 3.0, 1.5gb RAM, 160gb Hitachi
Deskstar HDD, Sony DVD-R.

I had a similar experience with the installation. I also did an upgrade and
it was very slow, took
1 1/2 hours, I thought the system was frozen but it came back to life. I
then got smart.

I reformatted the hard drive and did a clean install. Everything went
quick, installation took about half an hour

Maybe there was issues during the update. Who knows. But I never have
liked an OS update, I prefer a clean install when
it's possible.

Give it time...mine sat there for 25 minutes before it continued on. How
long have you waited before trying again?

Jeff

[unmboy]

I agree with Mr. Schafer for anyone experiencing the install get "stuck".

After a reboot, my upgrade seemed to be stuck at 21% for several minutes. About 35 min later as I was googling and reading through this thread, it started moving again.

Hey John,

I'm having - more or less - the same problem here.
Expanding goes on to around 21%, then my PC tells me it has to reboot. Well
- fine with me!
But trying to reboot the only message I get is "Disk read error".
In other words: The old (XP-) bootsector seems to have vanished and the new
one (Vista Ultimate) is not yet properly installed.
It makes no difference at all if I do an upgrade or a clean install.
The only probable cause I came up with was a memory problem. But any memtest
I run delivers no problems at all.
Not to mention that the Vista upgrade advisor gave the green light as well.

I could get my XP back running by using the repair-function. Boot sector
re-installed and XP was running again.

However I would like to get my shiny new Vista Ultimate running. But nobody
really can tell me what the problem might be.

Maybe one question for all those who did succeed in installing Vista:
Is it normal that the PC reboots at around 21% or should it wait until all
files are expanded??

Mike

I am wondering the same thing. TG

Yep, its suppose to. This is the 1st attempt to boot some drivers.

Thanks for the info, after this first reboot, my install seems to hang
at the bluish colored vista screen. Maybe I'm being impatient and not
waiting long enough, But I did wait at least an hour.

I would then get frustrated and hold the power button in. I'll try
again tonight before I go to bed and let it run overnight on a system
that has a fresh install of Windows Xp. Plus I'll remove all the
extra stuff like my TV tuner, second hard drive, second optical drive
and of course all the USB stuff.

You shouldn't have to wait more than a few minutes, tops. If you
system doesn't do anything for a hour, then something is wrong,
probably a driver issue. Usually Windows will pop up a blue screen of
death message with a bunch of gibberish in hexademical code. It can't
always do that, depending on what happened.


Sometimes, but not always Windows lists one or more drivers, other
times it just gives a stop code like 00000007B, which frequently means
it stumbled on a driver. This tends to be more annoying than a fatal
flaw. However you do need to fix what caused it. Typically by
disabling the problem device in BIOS or unplugged its data cable and
power supply Windows should get past the hang.

If you have lots of USB stuff, that may be it if they've got their own
old XP drivers. Windows supplies a new generic one that supports a lot
of USB devices. However the rub is you usually got to get Vista up and
running first, then it should by itself do the "found new hardware"
dance and install drivers for it. You can help Windows by not
overwhelming it having it find all kinds of new stuff at once. This
can and does lead to hangs. Best to yank all your unneeded stuff, then
once Vista is up, put them back one at a time. I know, a royal pain in
the butt if you got lots of stuff.

Thanks Adam. I'm going to try again tonight and will report back.

Well this Windows Vista should be called Windows codename: Blue Screen
instead. It is so awful starting from the installation, i had the same
problem. Guess how i overcome it. I just run 5 times the installation and it
upgraded. During the 4th time i opened the tray of the DVD after it reboot at
expanding 21% and closed it again later (but before it starts reading it),
but it stuck later. Again with the same trick the fifth time it worked!

All these things with the drivers reminds me of linux...

Nezos

Well I did finally get Vista installed after I removed my AGP graphics
card, second hard drive, second optical drive, tv tuner and all the
USB stuff.

After Vista was installed, I reinstalled all the hardware and I must
say that everything seems to be working fine. Thanks TG

Congrats totallygreen,

you guys seem to be lucky, because at least your Vista does boot and
produces some sort of error message. So it's quite obvious that a driver
issue is the probable cause.

In my case it does not boot at all ("Disk read error"), so I guess it fails
to produce a decent boot sector before trying to reboot.

I really don't think I'm having some driver issue here.

Anyone has an idea??

Mike