formatted vista 64 and reinstalled trouble!

[doggles]

hi...

so saturday, had the bright idea of formatting my pc as it had about a years worth of junk on it and wanted a clean install,

I have vista 64 oem version.......so i insert disk go throught the reinstallation process....delete partiction and install vista....pc crashs during install.....this happens several times.

I changed my usb k/b and mouse for an os one crashed during install again.....read somthing onn the internet about the amount of ram ..so took out 2 gig of the ram i had in so i only have 2 gig of ram in,.,,,

install goes through fine.........however.. when my pc starts i have a screen which asks me to choose the op system which i want to use... there are two of the half intalled versions there and the one which works....

also there's a copy of xp ( i got sick and tired of installing vista after about 5hrs and installed a copy of xp to delete the partitions) - btw I have 2 hard disks, it appears that the half installed versions are on the hard disk which i didn't want to install vista or xp on....

so i'm left with a pc which has a working copy of vista and 2 half corrupt versions and a version of xp - .......how on earth do i get rid of the 2 corrupt and the xp - i tried going and deleting the partitions (on my second disk)and formatting with the vista disk, however it does this and then boots and i get error msg - you need to insert system disk and press enter....then change the boot sequence to the other h/d and i get the choice of the op systems again, which i thought i'd got rid off.!!!!

any ideas? short of starting all over again.....

 

[Olibubble]

Remove the HDD you Don't want to install any OS on.
Use your XP disc to format the remaining HDD*
Install Vista.
Reconnect the other HDD
Make sure the HD Boot order is correct in the bios.
Enable Hidden/Protect files on Explorer
Deleting anything on the root directory of the 2nd drive.


*I say use the XP disc as I had an issue once where I could not install Vista properly because of some corruption on the primary HD. Vista would claim to format the drive, but in my opinion the Vista drive formatter has a bug whilst XP formatter has never let me down.

 

[doggles]

Remove the HDD you Don't want to install any OS on.
Use your XP disc to format the remaining HDD*
Install Vista.
Reconnect the other HDD
Make sure the HD Boot order is correct in the bios.
Enable Hidden/Protect files on Explorer
Deleting anything on the root directory of the 2nd drive.


*I say use the XP disc as I had an issue once where I could not install Vista properly because of some corruption on the primary HD. Vista would claim to format the drive, but in my opinion the Vista drive formatter has a bug whilst XP formatter has never let me down.

cheers....do you think that the problem i've had may be related to the drives being sata, and the drive which i don't want the o/s on but had ended upwith corrupt o/s's has an earlier sata number - i.e. 1 and the drive that i do what the o/s on is lower down like sata 3

 

[Olibubble]

There are flags on the drives and partitions that inform the OS which is active and what is boot, etc. It could be that somehow these got mixed up on a install that went wrong. So that Vista installed the bootloader on Sata 1, but then assumed that actually the active drive is Sata 3 and installed the OS on there.

It doesn't make a difference really what the SATA number of the drive is as you can set the boot order in the BIOS, although it is a good habit to get into to have the BOOT/PRIMARY/ACTIVE drive as SATA1.