Vista Ultima - Blank screen of first boot with a flashing cursor

Hey,

I've done a search for this but it's kind of a hard one to put in to keywords without getting tonnes of results with radically different problems. I bought a new computer a few months ago and bought Vista Ultimate OEM but I still needed XP for work so I just put my old XP harddrive in, played around with installing some drivers and everything worked swell. I had some free time on the weekend though and decided I may as well install Vista now. I chucked the DVD in and booted from it, then began the installation. I've got 3 hard drives, one of them is XP, one is for the bulk of my files and finally one that I cleared everything off of, ready to be formatted and have Vista put on. The installation seems to have gone fine, it unpacked all the files and installed everything. It rebooted, assumedly at the end (I didn't hang around to watch it install for half an hour) and booted in to XP. Cool, so I rebooted again, went to the boot menu and selected the Vista hard drive and then nothing happens. I get a black screen with a white blinking "_" cursor. I went back in to XP and looked on the Vista harddrive and it appeared to have the entire file structure on it. So is there any advice you can give? I'm not quite sure what else to try other than do a completely fresh install.

My computer: Asus Striker Extreme, Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, XFX 8800 GTX, 2GB Crucial Ballistix + 2 IDE and 1 SATA drive

sounds like your computer went to sleep after the install and now cannot wake up - common vista problem - go into BIOS and play around with sleep options i find s3 works best usually or turn sleep off - you should also read the excellent sleep tutorials on this website - you can probably run powercfg from xp and see sleep options - hope this is helpful

- oh and i forgot to mention - turning sleep off is the last thing to try because you will be forced to re-install vista without acpi - good luck

Sounds like install didn't finish, after first reboot you should have been there to choose Vista. Sounds like it booted into XP and didn't finish set up.

I did a dual booted install aswell and you have done the right think by installing on seperate HD's! So well done there I had the menu aswell, xp is under the "older versions of windows" tab then you select xp. Vista should be on the main menu tab above the Older versions tab.

If you see that then you know you can access it correctly. It does sound the installation might not have configured right. I would advise to reinstall vista and select format the drive during installation. I would sit there through the process as windows might ask your for command path's etc. Just watch Tv while sitting there if you have to lol! It worked for me, Is your vista an upgrade disk or the actual program?