Well at least I hope this helps you as it helped me, for a start I was having all the same problems mentioned in the "black screen of death" threads throughout this site and others: This should help those with ATI cards and possibly those with other graphics cards and similar problems
For me, Vista installed in about 30 minutes, and did numerous restarts, until it would reach the time for its first run, upon which the screen would stay black for about 2 minutes, followed by a forced restart due to an error, followed by the blue screen listing the error ("Attempt to reset display driver and recover from timeout has failed" etc).
Solution: - (What I Did)• To start, I downloaded: • “7-6_vista_xcode_48645.exe” and “7-6_vista32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_48645.exe”
• NOT “catalyst_8-31-100-3-2-1_vista32-64_rtm.exe” (This causes problems).
• I stored the “vista_xcode” and “ccc_wdm” directly on my XPPRO partition in a folder named vista (C:\VISTA). “You should download specific vista drivers for your card, use Google to find them”.
• Following this, I used “Partition Magic” to redo the partition for vista. (Not always necessary).• The vista partition was set as a logical partition, and left UNFORMATTED.
• I then restarted the computer, and went into the BIOS, were I disabled hyperthreading and underclocked the RAM (or just reset your BIOS settings to default, usually by pressing F6 or F7 and disable hyperthreading).
• Then I booted back up into XP, were I mounted the vista disk image and initiated the install (from within XP), I chose the custom install, and set it to install on the logical partition I created earlier.
• NOTE: I also allowed the updates from the Internet to be downloaded by the setup. (use the “Windows+D” keys to get back to the desktop if needed)
• I allowed the setup to continue through its processes and the necessary restarting until a particular point.
• Just BEFORE the “Completing Installation” process was reached, I waited for the machine to restart upon which I began tapping F8, and chose the “Safe Mode” option.
• Next I received an error message, saying “setup cannot continue in safe mode”, IGNORE THIS, but DON’T press OK. Just leave it there, and press “Shift+F10” then type “devmgmt.msc” and press enter, minimise the screen that appears and type “explorer” and press enter.
• This gives you two basic options to start the install of the vista drivers, you can either go to where the default video drivers are located and choose to update them by selecting where you new files are, or do as I did and locate where you stored the .exe files mentioned earlier (in my case I stored them in “C:\VISTA”).
• NOTE: Folder windows, did not open for me while in safe mode, so I had to locate the files by using the “RUN” command - Press the “Windows Key” and the “R Key” together to open the “RUN” dialog box, and type in the location of the file - In my case “C:\VISTA\7-6_vista_xcode_48645.exe” then pressing enter to run the setup, and “C:\VISTA\7-6_vista32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_48645.exe” followed by pressing enter and running setup.
• BEFORE INSTALLING THE NEEDED APPLICATIONS: Check that the location they are to be extracted to is on the correct drive letter (It will try to default extract to “C:\” change the drive letter to wherever you have installed vista.
• Next restart the machine and continue to tap “F8” - This time, choose the “Disable Driver Signing Enforcement”.• Upon the next stage, the vista setup says “Completing Installation”, this time you should again press “Shift+F10” but only type “explorer” this time, followed by pressing enter
.• You should see a small dialog box appear at the top left of the screen saying it is preparing your account, about 5 minutes later setup will again restart for the final time.
• Vista should now work straight away, and the “Rollback” option should have disappeared from the start-ups options. I hope this helps (even if it is a bit late); it worked for me first time - If it doesn’t, check you did everything correctly, if you are sure you did then post any questions and I may check back within the following weeks.
HEY----
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