V1500 blue screens on Vista Ultimate install

My dad who lives 2000 miles away bought Vista Ultimate retail and decided to reformat his Vostros 1500 because his Vista Home was acting wonky. Argh.

Apparently he tried deleting all the partitions (Dell utility, Dell repair, dell media direct, all your base are belong to dell, C:, etc) and then proceed to install.

Apparently, midway through, the laptop will always reboot, then blue screen, then drop him off at the "Safe, Normal" boot prompt.

Faaaaaaaaaaaaantastic.

What can I do to help him out here? Did deleting Dell MediaDirect (which I've heard so much badness about) do some horribleness to this PC?

I would hate to have him restore Dell MediaDirect and then Dell Vista Home, only to upgrade to Vista Ultimate - I'd prefer not to have to spend 10 hours remotely helping him uninstall all the Dell bloatware.

Thoughts?

 

It sounds like you have ACHI enabled in the BIOS and you didn't load the ACHI drivers when you installed Vista U.

You have two options:

1) Go into the BIOS F2 on startup and disable ACHI.
2) Find a USB Drive and install the ACHI drivers. Insert the Vista CD and load the ACHI drivers from the USB drive.

Truth be told I no longer use ACHI as there really isn't any performance benefit that I see. I'm running "compatibility mode", non ACHI and the system is no faster or slower with or without it.

So the bottom line is, if you want the easy fix. Check your BIOS, if ACHI is enabled just disable it. Reboot your laptop and you should be good.

p.s. deleting the hidden partitions are not causing your problem. I've deleted them on my Vostro 1500 and 1700 and it doesn't cause any problems.