Got Wills

I’ve been troubleshooting a coworkers computer for the past 2 days, trying to figure out why the Vista install freezes when it is trying to partition the disk.

It’s an old case and power supply, but almost everything else in the computer is new (installed by the coworker/client), so naturally, I assume that something is defective or installed incorrectly.

I start by reseating all of the cables, still a no go. I go into the bios to check the configuration and find that the hard drive is set as slave, fix that, still a no go.

This is where I hitting it with diagnostics. The hard drive doesn’t show any SMART errors and all tests with Data Lifeguard Tools pass. On to the memory… MemTest86 doesn’t come up with anything.

Now I am starting to think it might be the disc, but the thing looks immaculate, I can’t see a scratch or other physical defect on it. Well, maybe it can’t partition the hard drive for some reason, so I use partition magic to cut out 100 GB of the 500 GB Western Digital and format it with NTFS. It still won’t install… In fact, now I don’t get any UI screens, just a mouse pointer on a pure black screen… weird.

Well, in order to be thorough, I thought I’d try one of my XP install discs that I’ve used before… Lo and behold, the system now has a working operating system.  What a hassle, all because of a bad disc with no visible flaws.