Legit Reviews

I've installed Vista at least twenty times today. Literally. Not making this up. First install was a x64, which crashed and burned because my X-Fi, SLI and 4GB RAM can't play nicely.

Second install was actually XP. However, it got to about 5% of copying files, then insisted that a certain file WOULD NOT COPY from my flawless original XP disc that I keep for just such a purpose.

After that, the XP install does the "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" and then gives me a lovely black screen from which 15 minutes of waiting produce exactly nothing.

Vista installs fine (apparently) but after completing all steps and rebooting, it just gives me a black screen with a cursor in the corner. I've formatted ten times, tried four times to load nVidia Vista drivers I extracted onto a USB memory stick and run CHKDSK twice.

I've used the automated boot recovery from my Vista DVD. I've flashed three different BIOSes to my A8N32-SLI Deluxe. PLEASE do not tell me my mobo is bad, I just spent a month waiting for a new one. This computer is the machine from hell. Everything I try makes something else go wrong. HELP!

Memory problems?

It recognising the RAM voltages, timings and speed properly? If it is get memtest and check that.

Dan

Well here's the thing.

My friend and I put my hard drive into his machine, and then installed Vista x64. It booted fine on his hardware. So we swapped the drive back into mine and after the BIOS/RAID screens we get this black screen with a little underscore-cursor in the upper left hand corner.

So we put his hard drive into my machine (to see if the mobo was bad or if I had a flaky SATA port, or power connector) and his install booted fine. So it can't be the drive itself or the mobo itself. Oddly, I can install and boot Vista on my RAID0 array, and use its boot manager to force a continuation of the Vista setup I tried to run on the Raptor. However, I still get this lovely black screen when I try to boot from the Raptor. Yes, the BIOS is set with the Raptor as first boot device.

The RAM all works, we memtested etc. If I try to boot the new Vista install, I just get a black screen after the OS choices menu. (There is an install of Vista on each drive now)