Should Vista home Premium 64 take 12 hours to only expand 31 %

nettspider · Apr 13, 2008

Hi,

I have built a new media centre machine .......

Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Socket AM2
Asus M2N-VM HDMI mother board
Maxtor 750 gig Hard drive
2 Gig Memory
LG GGc-H20L Super Multi Blue DVD player

I am trying to install vista and it goes through setting up with out any problems all seems ok except that the file expanding process is taking for ever ......... any suggestions Please

I have checked the bios configurations and cpu temperature etc ......... all seems fine.

Help....

Dwarf · Apr 13, 2008

It sounds as though there is something amiss with your setup. I can reinstall my version of Vista, together with SP1, in around 2 1/2 hours, and be fully running. What speed is your memory? Are the memory modules matching? If your motherboard is capable of utilising dual channel memory, have you got the modules in the correct slots? Does the memory speed match the system bus? If this is a new hard drive, are you doing a quick or full format? Are your optical and hard drives on separate interface cables?
Dwarf

nettspider · Apr 14, 2008

Thanks Dwarf for the reply, Speed of the memory, i'm not sure but recomended by the shop I also bought the motherboard from. Dual Channel Memory. Pretty sure they are in the correct slots, however I will double check once installation finally completes. The mother board is jumperless, however I did go through the bios to check all settings prior to trying to reinstall a second time ........ 45% now in approx 14hrs. CPU is remaining cool so its not over heating. Optical drive is on a separate SATA interface and I have partitioned the drive to 30 gig for the os, but even on a full format I wouldn't expect it to take soooooooooo long.

Clevo · Apr 14, 2008

nettspider said:
Thanks Dwarf for the reply, Speed of the memory, i'm not sure but recomended by the shop I also bought the motherboard from. Dual Channel Memory. Pretty sure they are in the correct slots, however I will double check once installation finally completes. The mother board is jumperless, however I did go through the bios to check all settings prior to trying to reinstall a second time ........ 45% now in approx 14hrs. CPU is remaining cool so its not over heating. Optical drive is on a separate SATA interface and I have partitioned the drive to 30 gig for the os, but even on a full format I wouldn't expect it to take soooooooooo long.

So on a 750g drive you only left 30 for the OS?

Could be part of the problem.... Personally I would have put it on a 250gig partition. I have mine on a 120gig sata HD on it's own and I wish it was on a bigger drive now.

Dwarf · Apr 14, 2008

I agree with Clevo. See the information from the link given below, in particular the 'Recommended system requirements'. Where it says '40 GB hard drive...', that also implies a partition size on a larger hard drive should you choose to use one. When you install Vista, the complete disk image is stored on your hard disk and is then expanded. The hard disk, or partition, therefore needs to be large enough to hold BOTH the disk image AND the expanded version as well as having a minimum of working space available for the system to use when expanding the files. With modern disk filing systems such as NTFS, there isn't as much need for disk partitioning on modern machines. This was often used on older machines because back then hard drives were more expensive and it was in everyones interest to ensure that storage space was used as efficiently as possible. Disk drives are divided into sectors, with groups of these sectors forming a single storage unit called a cluster. Each individual file, whether it be a few bytes or several megabytes in size, occupies at least 1 cluster. Because of the address capacity limitation of older filing systems, the larger the disk capacity the larger the clusters and the more space wasted. This was partially overcome by dividing the drive into smaller partitions. The filing system on Vista, NTFS, does not suffer from this limitation.
Dwarf

Windows Vista Ultimate

Footnote: These are the recommended requirements for the Ultimate edition of Vista, but looking at the Home Premium edition (which is what you have), the requirements are identical.

nettspider · Apr 15, 2008

Thanks Guys for the info ........ the reason for the 30 gig was because I only intended it for use as a media PC and so thought 30gig would be enough for the os as I had no intention of adding other programs (possibly a little short sighted!) ...... maybe reading the packaging would have helped re min size of disk space required

.

Partitioning was done so that should the drive get corrupted or a virus destroy the system area I would have a chance to recover any media files on the hard drive.

I have taken note and will go back to the pc and start again, since it still hasn't finished! ........

I shall report back .... thanks for your help so far.

glatzfront · Apr 15, 2008

I installed Ultimate on a 32 GB partition with no problems. Partition size probably isn't the issue.

Might need to run a full disk check before installing?

glatzfront · Apr 15, 2008

I think the OP's reason (security) for the smaller partition size is legitimate. Having everything on one large partition does have some disadvantages, another would be when running a needed disk check on a 30 GB verses a 250 GB partition.

nettspider · Apr 15, 2008

Issue found ........... :D

I tried increasing the partition size and this made no difference.

I had a hunch that the new dvd player causing the problem, installed an older one from another machine onto the ide port on the motherboard and hey presto it all installed fine in less than an hour.

I haven't gone through any settings to complete the setup but it has fully installed. Now to see whats up with the DVD player, probably just a compatability issue.

Thanks guys for your time and thoughts, very much appreciated. BTW I thought about the size of partitons etc and decided to keep the increased 200 gig partition for the OS and additional programs as it is probably more practical.

Thanks again

Dwarf · Apr 15, 2008

Pleased to see that you have solved your problem. I notice from your posts that you originally had a SATA optical drive and that you replaced it with a PATA version. Although there is nothing wrong with SATA optical drives, if you have a PATA/IDE port on your motherboard I recommend that you use this for optical drives and use the SATA ports for hard drives. Another possibility is that you had the settings in your BIOS incorrectly configured. This would not have had any impact on the first stage of setup - transferring the image to your hard disk - but it might well have an impact on the expanding files stage. With some BIOSes, there is a setting to inform the system whether a hard drive or an optical drive is connected to a SATA port, and this may or may not need to be manually set if the BIOS doesn't automatically detect it.
Dwarf

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