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Can't install Vista after replacing HDD

post #1 of 5
9/19/07 at 9:46am
Thread Starter 
After reading some reviews of the Asus G1S I decided to buy one today. However, I thought the 4200rpm HDD would be a bottleneck so decided to buy a 7200rpm HDD instead from Seagate. After replacing the hard drives myself, I ran into a problem installing Vista:

I tried installing it using the recovery disks, but that just ends up "finishing" the installation, bringing me to the login page but having the error message (I'm quoting word for word here): "Windows could not complete the installation. To install Windows on this computer, restart the installation".

So I did. 3 or 4 times. Then I figure that there is actually nothing on the blank HDD to "recover" so I borrow my friend's Vista home premium DVD and use that to "reinstall" Vista, but using my serial number (which is for Windows Ultimate). So it ends up working (login page says "ultimate"), but when I try to activate the key online it says that it's invalid...

And I end up reinstalling it again using the Asus recovery disk (very poor decision) and now I can't even reinstall anymore - pressing escape at the start brings me to the choice of the disk or the DVD rom but choosing either just brings me to the "Windows could not complete..." error message again.

Sorry for the length, but I searched the net and couldn't find any answers - if anyone could help me out I'd really appreciate it.
(I'm from Aus and this is the G1S AK048G if that is relevant)

Thanks alot!
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post #2 of 5
9/20/07 at 11:08am
Your problem is most likely that Vista is detecting that you've got a different hard drive in your system than the one that was originally there when the recovery disks were made. This constitutes a hardware change which Vista would detect in the installation process. Hardware changes can prevent Vista from installing correctly. If you've still got the original hard drive, I'd suggest migrating the info and operating system from it to your new hard drive with a program like Acronis MigrateEasy or similar. If it's the same size hard drive, you can use Vista's migration utility, but if the new hard drive has a larger capacity, I'd suggest using a different program, as Vista's utility has evidenced some bugs when transferring between different capacity hard drives.
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post #3 of 5
10/7/07 at 2:23am
You may solve the problem without any risk of failure by Asus Technical servise.
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post #4 of 5
11/14/07 at 3:48pm
Hi -- I think the problem is with the recovery disk and not with your hard drive. The recovery disk itself is not defective, and you can use it to restore your system. You just have to ignore the instructions that the disk gives you and follow the steps listed below.

I encountered a similar problem yesterday when trying to do a clean install on the Asus G1 with the factory recovery disks. Finding no solution on the web, I contacted their technical support department and was connected to a technician fairly quickly. He told me that the secret is to install the recovery disk and go through the entire disk reformat and installation process. When it has completed, a window will pop up and ask the user to insert the drivers disk. The technician told me to just remove the recovery disk, force the power off by holding down the power button, and then reboot without any disk in the drive.

I was skeptical, but this actually worked. Better yet, it performed a truly clean install of Windows Vista without loading all of the additional drivers and utilities that typically come preinstalled on the system.

After the clean installation was complete, I used the drivers disk to upload the necessary drivers and everything now seems to be working fine.
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post #5 of 5
11/14/07 at 4:34pm
I'm glad you got it worked out. Sounds like the Asus software writers need to talk more with the Asus tech support people!
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