Vista Ultimate upgrade killed my laptop

I attempted to upgrade my Gateway CX210 tablet from XP Home to Vista Ultimate (my other 2 PCs are using VU so for the sake of consistency I decided to upgrade the GW.)

The installation seemed normal until the very end when the 'clean up' was underway. It stalled. The activity dots continued to blink, but the progress bar stopped about 3/4 of the way to the end. It stayed like that for a couple of hours. It was locked up and I powered off and restarted. The installation stopped at the same place.

I attempted to reload XP. After the initial installation screen showed a number of files being accessed I got a message that 'no hard drive was found and the installation ended. I tried a couple of times with the same result.

I went into set up and it shows the hard drive. I created a boot disk 'Bart PE' and have access again. But, when I look at 'My Computer' there is no C drive. It shows the CD and a Ram drive with some odds and ends, but no 'c:'.

I'm stumped. I was going to wipe the c: drive and start over, but I can't even get to it. To make things worse, I can get a command prompt, but numbers lock is stuck on so I can't even access a colon.

I have access to the CD with a number of utilities but right now that's it.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Gary

 

It sounds to me as if the laptop requires AHCI drivers to access the hard drive. This is common and easily solvable. As you are using a laptop I assume you do not have a floppy drive so I would recommend reading this guide on how to slipstream drivers: http://www.digitgeek.com/how-to-slipstream-sata-drivers-into-xp-cd/

Please note however that the drivers for your laptop should only be obtained from the manufacturer for security reasons.

 

I tried the slipstreaming the HD drivers but couldn't get it to work. I also tried flashing the bios using BartPE. None of it worked. This was really frustrating. I couldn't finish installing Vista (I think because BIOS needed to be undated - Gateway has BIOS updates that specify Vista) and I couldn't go back to XP because it could no longer recognize the HD. I spent two days trying to find ways to get Vista or XP to install.

I finally got really fed up, DBAN'd the HD and loaded ubuntu. After nuking the HD, it took me less than an hour to be up and running with a Linux based OS, a suite of application programs, and connected to my home network. It was so easy I was stunned. What's more the programs take up about 1/10th disk space and run faster. Oh yea, and they're free. I'm going to see how this works for a while an I may convert the rest of my computers.