Vista - Constant Restart on Installation

I partitioned a 20Gb section of my hard drive and started installing Vista as a new installation in that area. The installation did its first restart then got about 20 seconds into the boot up, where the green heartbeat bar ripples at the bottom of the screen, then restarted. This has quickly become a loop I cannot get out of.

Essentially, I have two issues to contend with here. How to either get the installation to continue witout constantly rebooting or how to cancel the installation and get my regular Windows XP to boot up again. The latter option will probably be the easiest I think.

To enable booting to Windows XP, change the boot sector using the
bootsect program on the Vista DVD: bootsect /nt52 sys

On Sun, 19 Apr 2009 12:41:22 -0500, JayEmGray
<guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote:

"JayEmGray" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:50c55ffcb76c42aef3917b4e18dc55cd@xxxxxx-gateway.com...
Hi Jay--

Try cleaning the DVD with something like Disk washer CD 6 from the center
out.
You NTFS formatted that slice of HD did'nt you?

Best,

CH

Thanks for the replies Chad and Andy. I keep a disconnected emergency HD in my PC case which allows me to run XP and internet etc., Using this, I renamed the $windows ... directories on my normal HD. On reboot, I got an install error message then was presented with a boot menu with the options Windows XP and Windows Vista Install. Think this was a result of having EasyBCD installed (providence). Anyhow, selected Windows XP and now everything is fine. Deleted the Windows Install option using EasyBCD front-end.

Still have the Vista install issue but suspect there is a driver or some piece of hardware on my system that the OS is not happy with. Will investigate later.

Cheers,

Jay