Windows Vista setup DVD stops during the animated splash screen phase and you are unable to begin the setup process

System Requirements:

  • Windows Vista

The Problem:

When you boot from the Vista DVD the boot process begins, however stalls at the animated splash screen which continues to animate indefinitely without any system activity. At this point you are forced to power down the system using the ACAPI switch.

This issue was observed as occurring on a P4 2.5 GHz running on an Asus P4S333 running the latest P4S533 Beta BIOS.

If you attempt to reproduce the boot using Safe Mode, the system loads disk.sys and then fails attempting to load the next driver (believed to be crcdisk.sys), this is constant no matter how you boot the system.

More Info:

Attempts to change the DVD ROM drive and Hard drive due to common troubleshooting material highlighting that this issue is down to a malfunctioning device on the IDE/SATA bus were of no use in this particular case, however may be applicable in your situation. Test your system with all hard drives disconnected to eliminate Hard disk errors. Attempt to replace the DVD drive or use an alternative DVD drive (cycling SATA/IDE channels) to eliminate your optical drives from the issue.

If you are certain that your drives and the IDE/SATA bus’s present in your system are not faulty follow the next steps:

Check your DVD Installation Disc
Try and get a replacement for the Disc if you can. All Vista Disc’s are standardised (finally) apart from the Enterprise edition. The retail and generic OEM disc’s are also the same so you can therefore download a new ISO image of the disc and burn it. I don’t see any issue with doing this, so long as you have your own legal Windows Vista key to use with the disc, and I think Microsoft should be firstly credited with unifying the disc, and secondly should enable all legal key holders to download an integrated ISO version with SP1 anyway!

 

Unload your PSU
I have been made aware of a fix to this issue which was resulting from an overloaded power supply. This wasn’t related to the fix on the system above, however was in the instance reported to me. Unload the PSU of any unecessary devices and case ‘accessories’ – including all but the required fans (run the case open if necessary for testing).

 

Disconnect any redundant internal drives from the Bus
If you have any drives on the system bus that you do not want the Vista installer to see, and have simply disconnected the molex (power) connector from the drive, be aware that this may still be causing the Vista load sequence some grief. Remove both the power and ATA/SATA ribbon/lead from the disk completely and retry the installation.

 

Disconnect any external drives that are surplus to requirements
In the instance above it was necessary to remove an external firewire drive in addition to the step below before the boot sequence would progress correctly into VGA mode.

 

Use VGA Mode to begin the installation process
This was the second required fix on the P4S333 from the documented instance above. The following allowed setup to continue:

  1. Inset the Vista bootable DVD
  2. Power down the system
  3. Boot the system onto the DVD drive
  4. Immediately begin pressing the F8 key – it must have registered before the first loading screen (with the white status bar indicating file extraction) is displayed on the screen
  5. The screen will return to the animated splash screen
  6. After a few moments a boot menu will appear, from the list, select “Enable low-resolution video (640×480)” from the list and hit enter

 

If the above method and troubleshooting steps still fail to enable the system to boot, repeat the last step, but use Safe Mode and allow the system to boot instead of VGA mode.