Windows Vista installation problems

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
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Hi guys,

I've been trying to install Vista onto my laptop (Dell D620) for a while now but always hit the same problem.

After it gets past copying files, following the stage where you enter your CD key, setup produces the following error message:

Windows cannot install required files. The file may be currupt or missing. Make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the installation. Error code: 0x80070017

Now, I did some research and most people suggested that it was the media thats normally at fault. So, I burned another ISO - this time at the slowest speed the burner would support, AND verified the disk after burning. Same problem.

In total, I tried 3 seperate ISO's - 1 copy of the 32bit and 2 copies of the 64bit (of which one was burnt at lowest speed and verified) but every time it would fail with the same error.

So I assumed the CD drive itself was at fault, and replaced the drive. New drive arrived today.

And the error is still present.

Any ideas? XP installs perfectly..

Oh, FWIW this is a perfectly legal fully licensed copy of Vista obtained legitimately through my University.
 
Well, reading through, I was going to suggest Media as my first choice but I see you've covered that. Its unlikely all of these iso's are corrupt. Were they downloaded? Or were they copied from another PC? Were the ISOs created correctly (do you know anyone else with the same ISO who has installed fine?)

Only other thing to look at is memory. As odd as it sounds I had a similar problem last week whereby XP installed fine but Vista wouldn't. Reduced the memory speed and it installed just fine.
 
The HDD is formatted each time - I've no idea where the ISO's came from as they are on a standaline ISO machine in one of the labs. I suspect they've been copied off DVD's sent from MSDN to the Uni or similar.
 
OK, next questions to ask are. Is it a VLK your uni have given you and if so, are the ISOs VLK versions? They may be OEM versions which wont work with a VLK key but normally they key would moan during install (unless you are selecting not to activate until online).
 
Download maxtor drive tools and low level format the drive. A standard format marks the blocks to be overwritten on next write. A low level format will acctually erase all blocks.
 
Butters said:
OK, next questions to ask are. Is it a VLK your uni have given you and if so, are the ISOs VLK versions? They may be OEM versions which wont work with a VLK key but normally they key would moan during install (unless you are selecting not to activate until online).
Click to expand...

That wouldn't give the error shown.

Burnsy
 
Burnsy2023 said:
That wouldn't give the error shown.

Burnsy
Click to expand...

This is true but as nothing else seems normal about this installation.

Ok, try some of these.

1)How many hard drives are in the PC? If more than one, are they the same?

2)If only one, what happens if you partition say 20Gb of it to install Vista.

3)Is the drive in IDE Legacy mode? If its in ACHI mode to start with you might have problems but I wouldnt have thought the install would let you get this far.
 
Fox have you run a memtest to make sure the RAM is OK?

EDIT: Also try the install without putting in a key but select the correct version of Vista, you can always put the key in later when the install finishes.
 
It's a laptop so I've got a single 100Gb HDD in it, which I've re-partitioned and is totally empty. Using no key makes no difference.
 
I think i'd be inclined to try the memory route now just to rule it out. Other than that I take it there's no sneaky Dell partition anywhere?

Other thing to try (although not ideal), is to put XP back on and upgrade using the Vista disk.
 
Try changing your HD or DVD drive to AHCI mode instead of IDE, had a similar problem on my PC and took me ages to figure it out.
 
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