Vista Installation Fails After First Reboot

Hi

I have been trying to install Windows Vista. Each time it fails on me.
First, I put in the disk, running smoothly and all. 100% Copying Files, 27%
Expanding Files, and the computer reboots. It reboots and after the loading
screen (with the green bar) goes away, there is a blank black page. It is
stuck on this page and doesn't go anywhere. Any help?

Computer Specs:
Gigabyte K7 Triton, nForce 2
AMD Athlon XP 2800+
Corsair 2x1gb Ram
DVD-ROM
DVD-Burner


Primary HDD-
120gb WD IDE

Slave HDD-
160gb SATA Seagate HDD
74.3gb SATA Raptor 10,000 RPM WD

Hi,

The same thing happened to me.
Didn't want to install off the original DVD by boot from CD, didn't either
by installation from XP, copied the content of the DVD to a drive different
from the one that i wanted to install vista to, without success.

I tried to install on another drive, and it worked.

Thing is, on the disk i wanted to install Vista to, i had a failing Vista
beta 2 before, with tons of undeletable files. My guess is that some of your
NTFS streams are locked up, and Vista setup cannot access them.

Solutions:
- install on another drive that never had any previous Vista (betas, RCs)
- try to format (not a quick format) the disk

[procompdata]

I have been researching this issue for days. I know the thread is old but I want to share what I found.

1) Drivers at/during install doesn't usually fix the problem.

2) Vista expects 2 partitions on the drive your installing to.

You need to prepare 2 partitions both NTFS. The main partition would be the majority of your partition at lets say 90%. The second partition would be the size of a recovery partition of around 12 to 20GB. This partition needs to be a primary partition and can be hidden. Acronis disk director suite works great. As stated in previous threads Vista will load drivers for SATA upon first stage of install. At that stage Vista loads drivers on the smaller second partition upon re-entry of the first boot. If you have only 1 partition it has nothing to save to besides memory which of course is now blank due to the reboot. Those drivers stay on the smaller partition until final reboot of the install, at this time the drivers are written to your main/large partition that Vista was installed to. From there on they are always at the front door of your boot. I only figured this out because of an upgrade to a 320GB SATAII drive on a laptop. I had a HD from another laptop that was 120GB SATAI which would take the install fine. When I tried the 320 with only one partition it would stop every time on first boot. I partitioned to 300GB NTFS Primary Active on the first, 20GB Primary Hidden on the second. This worked and now makes perfect sense. Microsoft engineers are morons for not letting Vista load drivers to the main partition on first boot. Hope this helps anyone in this situation.