RON

I just received an E1705 this week and I was able to do a clean install of
Vista Utimate in about 45 mins which is about 15 mins. longer than it took to
install Vista Premium on a desktop system. After the program was installed I
installed all the drivers and the system is running fine. The clean install
maybe the easiest option for you.

Note: If you use ZA Pro do not install it because I did and ended up doing
another clean install of Vista.

"Tony Tait" wrote:

> Hi all,
> I'm on my second try to upgrade my xp pro install to Vista business
> (free from the MS 'together' promo) on my Dell Inspiron E1705. When the
> install gets to the (I presume) last reboot and tries to 'start for the
> first time' I get an immediate BSOD and reboot after the Vista load
> screen. The BSOD is much too fast to read the stop code as the machine
> reboots instantly. 'A quick flash of blue'.
> I'm currently running 'startup repair' from the DVD, but it's been
> running for 16 hours already. There is still HD activity going on,
> albeit slowly. I chose to upgrade because I thought it would be easier
> that re-installing all my apps. I do have a full backup image on a USB
> hard drive.
> SO: Does anyone know how long Startup Repair takes to finish, or how
> long I should wait beforre giving up?
> Dell has Vista upgrades on their site and I did upgrade the Bios to A06
> that is for Vista compatibility, but some (the chipset and video drivers
> in particular) won't install unless you're already running Vista. A
> classic catch 22.
> So, here I sit, watching the blue bar of startup repair cross the screen
> of my laptop.
> Any suggestions at all (beside the obvious 'do a clean install') to get
> this to complete would be greatly apprecieated.
> Thanks for reading.
>
> ADDED:
> It's now been about 25 hours that Startup Repair has been running.
> My version of Vista is a full install, not an upgrade, but I was hoping
> to upgrade in place because of around 80 GB of installed apps, some of
> which were upgrades requiring the disks of the previous versions. Who
> knows where all those disks are, cuz I don't. (at least quickly)
>
> ADDED again:
>
> OK, I stopped the startup repair. Read the log. No error codes except
> the event list did not finish processing. After 30 hours, it was never
> going to.
> I went into bios and disabled a lot of stuff, and tried to start it in
> safe mode with minimal (VGA) resolution. This caused the BSOD to stay on
> the screen long enough to read the error code: 0x18 'reference by
> pointer'. There is no KB article that I can find that refers to this
> error code.
> I'm very close to doing a clean install, but I'm stubborn.
> I'm in a dos window now and I can see my C: drive and the Dell directory
> that has the Vista drivers. (Note to self: next time I extract driver
> files, give the folder a meaningful name. R142930 just doesn't cut it. )
> So I have to go to the dell vista drivers and downloads site and look at
> the drivers to decode what the numbers mean.
> BUT!!! If I am successful in loading the vista drivers and they actually
> install from a dos prompt, It would be next to impossible to roll back
> to XP should the installation still fail.
>
> Is there anything I can do to make this work from the DOS prompt??
>
> A clean install just might be the only answer and spending 2 or 3 days
> finding and installing apps might be my fate.
>
> Tony
> Dell E1705, T2500, NV 7800 Go, 100GB Sata 5400, 1GB ram, wireles ABG
> card and bluetooth.
>