I just spent the last 14 hours trying to install Vista :(

Installed Vista on my old Acer, took less than 30 minutes. Thought that I'd install Vista on my X60t before having supper with time to spare... boy was I wrong.

I'm installing Vista over an external USB drive. It'll get to the "DOS" screen with the black and white vertical lines at the bottom, then it'll go to the Vista loading screen, and then it'll go to the green Vista screen with a cursor and then it'll just stop.

I waited but nothing else happens. Tried with another stick of ram. Same thing. Upgraded to the latest bios. Popped in an xp cd but the setup aborted as it was loading the files with an error at the keyboard stage. Tried the ultimate boot cd but i'll get errors when i try to load some of the boot programs.

Tried using Diskpart to delete the partition but I'm not sure if I'm doing it right as the OS is in another language. Downloaded the Hitachi tool to readjust the disk size to the default amount but i'm not sure if that did anything.

Does anyone have any idea what is happening? I spent two hours on hold at lenovo support but the guy was clueless. I've pretty much exhausted all of my options.

 

External USB Drive? Is this a CD Drive or a HD Drive?

 

It's a dvd drive.

 

It could be a faulty drive. Have you troubleshooted with another computer? Try plugging the USB drive into another computer.

 

Is the external dvd drive slim-line or the regular 5.25" as found on the desktop? If it's the former, did you put AC adapter to give it power, or is it just powered via the USB port?

 

Well I just bought the driver new and confirmed that it was working inside windows but i'll try it on another machine. I seem to recall that there were some brands that were having trouble booting via usb. If that was the case however, shouldn't it not begin to load vista/other boot cds at all?

It's the regular 5.25. I was thinking of getting a slim one. Could it be powered by just the USB port?

 

It depends. If the slim drive gives you two USB cables, one for data and one for power, then it can be powered by USB ports. Models like the LG slim one sold on Bestbuy and many "generic" ones from eBay. Also, if you just want to read "CD-ROM", most of the time, merely the USB data cable is enough (meaning it requires only one USB port). If you want to read "DVD-ROM" or write CD/DVD, you need both cables attached (meaning you need two USB ports).

If however the drive gives you an AC-Adapter, like the regular 5.25" or like SONY DRX-S50U/S70U, then you need the AC adapter all the time.

Try to get a new one (different models, regular or slim) somewhere and do the install again. If not working, return it. I think that's the easiest way to do the debug.

 

Weird. I've had a problem where a system wouldn't boot up on usb but never seen one where it'll boot half way. I replaced it with another brand and it works fine now.