Upgrading from XP to Vista

Stephen P

I bought Vista Home Premium today. Tried to install it but wouldn't. My system is compatible, I had to uninstall my Anti-Virus first and update some drivers. The process went about 50% complete and re-booted itself (as it said it would several times) when it re-booted the CD ROM drive kicked in and the setup window popped up, I closed that down and the system restarted, I ejected the Vista DVD and then the setup process tried to restart but couldn't so I re-booted the system and went into F2 mode to disable boot from optical drive and tried to get the Vista setup to continue from where it finished but it wouldn't. Did ejecting the DVD whilst the upgrade was taking place have an effect? Or was it something else? My PC spec is well able to run Vista Home Premium.

I'd appreciate any help. I'm not going to bother trying it again tonight as it takes too long. I'll try it tomorrow evening but I'd like some advice first.

8T8

What version of Vista the retail/OEM/upgrade version ?

I presume the process you followed was this
* Ran upgrade process within Windows
* Initial upgrade process completed
* System rebooted but booted from DVD into Vista OS installer
* Removed DVD and OS booted but setup process hanged ?
* Disabled boot from disc & put DVD back in but setup procedure still fails to complete (what do you actually see on screen & how far in this process/steps do you get)

Go into the bios enable the boot from DVD and what options do you have can you run the repair option ?

Stephen P

8T8 wrote:

What version of Vista the retail/OEM/upgrade version ?

I presume the process you followed was this
* Ran upgrade process within Windows
* Initial upgrade process completed
* System rebooted but booted from DVD into Vista OS installer
* Removed DVD and OS booted but setup process hanged ?
* Disabled boot from disc & put DVD back in but setup procedure still fails to complete

Go into the bios enable the boot from DVD and what options do you have can you run the repair option ?

I have the Upgrade version. The process you mentioned above is exactly what happened. If I re-enable the boot from DVD option isn't that going to cause the Vista OS installer to appear after re-boot and I'm back to square one? What does the repair option do?

EDIT: It didn't restart between "Copying Windows Files" & "Expanding Files" it actually restarted at 21% at Expanding Files and then the setup process booted up.

Stephen P

I turned on my PC this morning to see what would happen. A black screen came up asking to insert the installation CD from an attempted installation and try to repair the previous installation. I didn't have time to do anything. If I insert the installation CD and follow the repair steps will it be a full proper upgrade installation? The boot from DVD drive option is still disabled, will I enable this option? If I do enable it and when the installation continues it'll re-boot every so often and the DVD installation is going to boot up every time, I don't want this to happen or will the setup process disable this? Should I also disconnect an external hard drives or other devices before proceeding?

8T8

In the bios make sure to set the HD as the first device in the boot order and DVD drive second. When you say you disabled the DVD drive I hope you just meant you took it out of the boot order/priority & not disabled it altogether in the bios ?

The repair feature has an option to check the system startup and see if anything is wrong, it may be able to repair the installation procedure. It is definitely worth a go as you have nothing to lose just choose "Startup Repair" from the list. When it's finished reboot leave the DVD disc in the drive and it should hopefully boot from the HD into the next stage of the install.

{Ignore any messages on screen from the Vista DVD prompting to boot by pressing any key}

So during the install it got to 21% expanding then it either restarted mid way through that which is bad or it completed that last stage and is now stuck at stage 20 as in the illustrated guide ?

Stephen P

8T8 wrote:

In the bios make sure to set the HD as the first device in the boot order and DVD drive second. When you say you disabled the DVD drive I hope you just meant you took it out of the boot order/priority & not disabled it altogether in the bios ?

The repair feature has an option to check the system startup and see if anything is wrong, it may be able to repair the installation procedure. It is definitely worth a go as you have nothing to lose just choose "Startup Repair" from the list. When it's finished reboot leave the DVD disc in the drive and it should hopefully boot from the HD into the next stage of the install.

{Ignore any messages on screen from the Vista DVD prompting to boot by pressing any key}

So during the install it got to 21% expanding then it either restarted mid way through that which is bad or it completed that last stage and is now stuck at stage 20 as in the illustrated guide ?

The DVD drive isn't disabled altogether just out of boot order. Yea it restarted at 21% expanding. Should it have restarted before that and at 21% expanding? Thanks btw for your help!

Stephen P

I found this site, is this what you were talking about 8T8? If I change the boot drive order the DVD drive shouldn't boot at all should it? Except to finish the installation.

What will happen after it reboots? Will it start the installation all over again?

8T8

Yes that's what I was referring to the repair option. When you install the Vista upgrade it modified the boot loader on the hard drive at no point should you boot from the DVD during the process it is simply not needed but the DVD must be present in the drive as it needs to read the files from it.

So set the HD as first boot, DVD as second after running the repair option and hope that corrects the problem.

As for the rebooting midway through 21% expanding it should not have done that as all that was the OS decompressing its files to the hard drive it should have gone to 100% then proceeded to two more items on the check list and reboot after that as you can see from the pictures in the guide.

The next reboot after that it when you are in the final stage so something definitely went wrong there.

Stephen P

8T8 wrote:

Yes that's what I was referring to the repair option. When you install the Vista upgrade it modified the boot loader on the hard drive at no point should you boot from the DVD during the process it is simply not needed but the DVD must be present in the drive as it needs to read the files from it.

So set the HD as first boot, DVD as second after running the repair option and hope that corrects the problem.

As for the rebooting midway through 21% expanding it should not have done that as all that was the OS decompressing its files to the hard drive it should have gone to 100% then proceeded to two more items on the check list and reboot after that as you can see from the pictures in the guide.

The next reboot after that it when you are in the final stage so something definitely went wrong there.

Thanks 8T8. I'll try it this evening and hopefully everything will go to plan.

I know you might not know but what could have went wrong?

8T8

No idea really, if it spontaneously rebooted midway the decompressing stage that is odd as its copying the files to the HD not actually installing the OS.

Power failure maybe, bad RAM in the computer I don't really know ?

By the way you never mentioned just what exactly happens if you boot straight to the HD with the Vista DVD present in the DVD drive ?

Do you get anything on screen ? a progress bar ? as the upgrade process depending on the system can take a long time up even up to several hours in some extreme cases.

Stephen P

8T8 wrote:

No idea really, if it spontaneously rebooted midway the decompressing stage that is odd as its copying the files to the HD not actually installing the OS.

Power failure maybe, bad RAM in the computer I don't really know ?

By the way you never mentioned just what exactly happens if you boot straight to the HD with the Vista DVD present in the DVD drive ?

Do you get anything on screen ? a progress bar ? as the upgrade process depending on the system can take a long time up even up to several hours in some extreme cases.

Before I touched the BIOS to disable "boot optical drive" the system booted up and the DVD drive automatically started up with the disc in the drive and the setup process began and the previous installation didn't continue, I cancelled out of that installation and the system restarted itself, at that stage I ejected the DVD and the system continued to start up and then an error message came up saying something about lack of sources, which I think was because there was no disc in the drive. If the disc was in the drive then it would have booted up at startup and giving me the option to start the install again, after that stage I disabled the "boot from optical drive". Maybe the priority was set correctly in the BIOS, but as far as I can remember the optical drive was second in the list and it still booted up. My system is only 7 months old, 1GB RAM, 2.4ghz Pentium D Dual Core Processor.

I checked compatibilty before hand and there was only software issues detected which I can fix once Vista is installed.

8T8

That is unusual as Vista's DVD should not boot automatically from the disc without a keyboard prompt to do so like "press any key to boot from disc".

It only auto boots if it can't detect an existing working OS, if the install crashed mid way through that might explain why it auto booted the DVD.

Stephen P

Would I be better off doing a clean install? I read somewhere that Vista creates a folder in C:\ called windows.old and all files and program files are saved in this folder when a clean install is done. I could just copy of the files when Vista is installed. Or could I do a system restore in XP to a few days ago and then try the installation again from scratch, would that work?

Stephen P

This guide shows the BIOS setup, this isn't what I done last night. Should priority No. 1 be HD or DVD drive?

EDIT: Forgot to include the link

MarkR

DVD drive first to install an OS.

8T8

Would I be better off doing a clean install? I read somewhere that Vista creates a folder in C:\ called windows.old and all files and program files are saved in this folder when a clean install is done. I could just copy of the files when Vista is installed. Or could I do a system restore in XP to a few days ago and then try the installation again from scratch, would that work?

A clean install will remove everything from the HD essentially your formatting the hard drive then installing the OS.

If you install over XP it will dual boot between XP/Vista.

The upgrade method what you where attempting is what creates the Windows.old folder

If you purchased the upgrade version then you need to have an existing Windows install present on the hard drive otherwise it wont activate so you can't clean install but there is an easy workaround follow this guide on how to clean install with the Vista upgrade (alternative more concise guide).

DVD first in boot order then boot Vista DVD run repair startup when it finishes and reboots go back into bios and select HD as first in boot order.

If you can get into XP all this time (I assumed you couldn't) then back up your personal data and just run the upgrade process again, you might want to remove any programs the Vista upgrade advisor warns you about beforehand. Or with your data backed up use the clean install method I linked to above.

Stephen P

No bother, I'll try all that later this evening and post when I've tried it and hopefully everything will work for me.

Thanks again for all your help 8T8, and thanks MarkR for your reply

Stephen P

After several hours I finally got Vista installed. The repair option worked. I must say its very nice, still have a lot to check out.

Thanks 8T8 for all your advice!!


Stephen

8T8

No problem glad to hear you got it sorted.