Vista Black Screen on Install

Question

I am trying to reinstall vista on a computer and the installation CD will not work. It keeps showing the gray and white bar saying it is loading files. After that, it gets to a black screen with a mouse cursor and just sits there.

I ran memtest86 on the computer and everything checked out. I also tried booting from an Ubuntu live CD, which booted perfectly fine and appeared to run.

What could be causing setup to hang?

Answer 1

It appears as though it was a hard drive issue. The computer had two hard drives in it, and the secondary hard drive was failing. When I disconnected it, the installation started properly and everything appears to be working fine.

If vista hangs at this screen for anyone, it may be a hard drive that has gone bad.