Originally Posted by Sulazoh

So. I have a 32bit Vista home premium Laptop. (Dell inspiron 1720)

I got it in 06, so it's been running fairly heavily for 4 years now.

At one point, perhaps 2 years ago, i restored it to factory condition, due to slight glitchyness, i spose it was just time for it to start on a clean slate.

Its been two years now, and it was starting to fall in ruts again, So i decided to restore it again, to factory condition.

Backed up everything, and whent to press ctrl-f11 on startup, but nothing happened.

So, after several trys, i decided to put the disk in.

Pressed f12 on startup, it read from the disk, said it was Loading files, and came up with the install windows screen.

I clicked install windows, got a list of the partitions, my back up which is 10 gig, and my OS, 61 gig.

I formated both, and then selected the OS to install windows onto.

It began the process, and whent through the checklist, untill reaching the last step " completing installation".

At this point, the loading light stopped blinking, all loading sound stopped, and the curser, when moved, stopped at intervills in a rather glitchy mannor.

I let it sit like this for around 4 hours.
When i returned to it, I found a black screen, with a large white pointer, which glitched much the way it had been before.
The loading light and such were still dorment.

I let it sit again like this for several hours, and nothing, so i shut it down, and attempted to log into windows.
It hit the screen just before loging in, where theres a bar in which 6 or 7 little green lines travel back and fourth in.

It sat here for several hours.

So i tryed re intsalling windows again, the OS was there, and had 54gigs outof 61 free, the same amount it had when i first got it, and when i restored to factory condition.

It keeps freezing on the "completing installation" step, and ends up with the same black screen.

Diagnostics dont find anything...
system repair has sat for several hours trying to find problems...

Safe mode freezes when loading files...

Nothing seems to be working.

Has my hard drive kicked the bucket?

I would try the repair option and see if it becomes bootable.
It's hard to say what the issue is. Could be dirt/scratch on the
install media. Or it could be some hardware issue. If the repair
doesn't work, since it's boat anchor at this point, I'd try putting
a Linux distro on. If it doesn't complete it's probably some hardware
on your machine. If it does then it's probably something with the
Windows media. Sometimes you can't even see a problem on these
optical discs and there's a corruption or CRC error.