Could not reinitialize the deployment engine

I am planning to do clean installation of windows Vista home premium but before that when i tried formatting the drive then i got an error message saying "Could not reinitialize the deployment engine " I dint knew what that means and i din't had any idea about it as well. While looking after a fix for that error I camed across similar threads and tried out solutions like disabling all non-essential features in BIOS and using SWISSKNIFE. SWISSKNIFE was quite helpful and i was able to format the drive with NTFS but now when i am trying to make a clean installation of Vista then i am getting another error message saying "Windows cannot install required files. The file does not exist. Make sure all files required are available. Error code 0x80070003." I am just running out of ideas now as i am not able to find out any fix for this new error message.

I will suggest you to Download "drive diagnostic utility" from drive manufacturer's official site. You can create a bootable floppy or CD having "drive diagnostic utility" and boot from it for running diagnostics check. If you want then you can also download a utility for writing zeros to the drive, once your drive passes the diagnostics check without any error then you can try out clean installation of windows Vista home premium.

I will like to inform you that Vista needs NTFS file system. There are several tools and software's for deleting partitions from the drive. You can use the one you find better and later allow Vista setup program for creating and formatting new partition. By the way which company drive you are using?

I am having western-digital drive. I will try following the solution that you both have mentioned and will post back the result i get later.

Rather than using drive diagnostic utility i will suggest you to use Acronis Disk Director which is a 3rd party program. You can use it for formatting all of your partitions as NTFS and try installing windows Vista after that.

Can you just post the exact error message you are getting,you seem to have post a part of it, I have checked regarding the error and have come across similar ones like "Windows Setup could not reinitialize the Windows Deployment Service engine." In different cases. Just post complete error message so that i can have better idea of the issue you are facing and will try to help you in dealing with it.

Eeshika18 i am not getting the error message you have installed rather i am getting below one:

Windows Setup could not reinitialize the deployment engine. To install Windows, restart the installation.

Even though Ive restarted windows installation several times i keep getting same error message again and again.Further help regrading this issue will be highly appreciated.

Yuksha, were you able to find a fix for this error message? I have recently started encountering above error message while updating vista using windows vista installation CD. In my case i am having single partition and i am having some crucial data in it which i cant afford to loose. So i wanted to know if there is any way by which i can make clean installation of vista without losing data? I need to do that as there is something wrong going on with my system.

Why don't you just back up all your data and applications that you might be having in your single partition somewhere else and do a clean installation of vista, I dot think there is anything else that you will be able to carry out since you are getting error message while updating vista. Just try out what Ive suggested and let me know if you get any help from it.

I got the same error trying to install Vista-32 onto a new hard drive. Here is what finally worked for me--just format the hard drive using a different computer. After that the OS reinstallation disk that came with my Dell Dimension worked fine. Hope this helps.

Two things to throw in that worked for me.
1. With the vista cd in you can format your drive by hitting repair computer(as opposed to install now) When there there is an option for command prompt. Click on it. Then type in(no matter what drive it is in) "format c:" or whatever drive your harddrive would be considered. NOTE: be careful with multiple harddrives. Make sure you know which is which or risk losing everything on the wrong harddrive. Now someone said earlier that you can't format in command prompt in ntfs. That is a lie. I'm not sure if it holds true with all computers, but my laptop (from the xp days) stated the new format will be NTFS. If it doesnt say NTFS this won't help you and see the posts above for other tools. But for me it formatted fine in NTFS.

2. After format i typed in "chkdsk c:" or whatever your drive may be. This allowed me to verify that it was in fact not a bad hard drive and in NTFS format. If not again this is my personal experience with a relatively old laptop and if it doesn't work for you there are tools above in other posts that may help.

Finally I reset and tried to install again. No problems.

Hopefully this isn't too hard to follow. I can bullet it if you need :)

Aleks