This has happened to me too. I was installing to an external USB hard drive
(beta 2) and on the first reboot, the screen would be black and just stay
that way for about ten minutes until I would reboot.
"Don" <don195702@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:OOhRhvWoHHA.716@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Supernova wrote:
>> Supernova wrote:
>>> Hi there,
>>> I wonder if anyone can help me.
>>> I have tried to install Vista on two different machines with no joy:
>>>
>>> 1) Machine one is my main PC which is getting on now but I believe is
>>> more than capable of running vista it has the following: MSI KT6
>>> Delta-FISR Motherboard, AMD Athlon XP-A 2100+ over clocked to 3200+, 2Gb
>>> of DDR Ram, ATI Radeon 9550 Graphics with 256MB. Running XP pro SP2.
>>> I have tried to install the business, ultimate and enterprise versions.
>>> I have tried the upgrade and the clean install paths with each version.
>>> Every time the installation hangs after the first reboot when the screen
>>> goes black with a blinking cursor at the top left hand corner. Any
>>> ideas?
>>>
>>> 2) Machine two is an Asus W5000 laptop with Intel centrino chipset... I
>>> can't remember the exact flavour though! I have tried to install the
>>> business edition on it when the installation hang with the BSD and some
>>> talk about the computer is being shut down to prevent damage. Now I
>>> haven't tried to do a clean install on this Laptop, only upgrade.
>>>
>>> PS All the above windows are downloaded from TechNet Plus as image files
>>> and burned to DVDs using Nero 7 premium
>>> Thanks a lot for any advice / help 
>> Just a Couple of corrections:
>> My main Pc CPU is an athlon XP 2500+ and it has a 250GB IDE and 150GB HDD
>
> The usual reason for this behavior is lack of correct hardware drivers for
> the video card or the disk controller (esp. SATA) or both.
>
> You didn't mention SATA, so my guess would be video drivers. You may
> need to download Vista-compatible video drivers from the manufacturer.
>