my bsod solved

Figured out what driver files to install.
When installing Vista from DVD, I would consistently get a BSOD when expanding files (during a reboot) with a machine_check exception. I knew that I probably needed to provide a SATA driver but just sticking my driver floppy in would not work and Vista would say "no driver files found".
I then opened my driver floppy in XP and dragged the XP driver files-- three of them-- onto the desktop and sent them to a formatted floppy. I left the floppy in the drive and inserted the Vista DVD into the DVD drive. I then did a custom install from within XP pro. The installer gave me the option of installing additional drivers, I accepted and the installer immediately came back with the correct driver from the the floppy. I left the disks in the drives and the installer handled everything without a glitch.
I had ZoneAlarm working and it asked me to allow or deny Windows permission to set boot flags and I clicked "allow". The computer rebooted a number of times and I did not touch any keys but just let it do its thing. No glitches.
I did the update installation while connected to the internet.
I had my Nec 3550 DVD as Primary Master and I moved that to the Secondary Master because of some threads that I had read about here, but I really don't think that was my BSOD problem-- I just wasn't getting the SATA driver installed, I think.
My system: Gigabyte K8U -939 -Uli AMD64 3200+ Venice Maxtor 250 GB SATA hdd 2 gb Corsair ValueSelect ram Sapphire ATI Radeon Atlantis 9600 (using DVI) 19 inch HANNS-G HN199D LCD monitor NEC 3550 DVD Internal floppy
I partitioned the hard drive when doing a clean install of XP pro sp2 to give me room for Vista. My C: drive has XP and the D: drive has Vista. The D: drive shows 77.5 GB with 67.6 free.
So far, Vista seems to work very well. I like the interface-- seems pretty clean and uncluttered.
Anyway, that was my installation experience.

stardis wrote:

Figured out what driver files to install.
When installing Vista from DVD, I would consistently get a BSOD when expanding files (during a reboot) with a machine_check exception. I knew that I probably needed to provide a SATA driver but just sticking my driver floppy in would not work and Vista would say "no driver files found".
I then opened my driver floppy in XP and dragged the XP driver files-- three of them-- onto the desktop and sent them to a formatted floppy. I left the floppy in the drive and inserted the Vista DVD into the DVD drive. I then did a custom install from within XP pro. The installer gave me the option of installing additional drivers, I accepted and the installer immediately came back with the correct driver from the the floppy. I left the disks in the drives and the installer handled everything without a glitch.
I had ZoneAlarm working and it asked me to allow or deny Windows permission to set boot flags and I clicked "allow". The computer rebooted a number of times and I did not touch any keys but just let it do its thing. No glitches.
I did the update installation while connected to the internet.
I had my Nec 3550 DVD as Primary Master and I moved that to the Secondary Master because of some threads that I had read about here, but I really don't think that was my BSOD problem-- I just wasn't getting the SATA driver installed, I think.
My system: Gigabyte K8U -939 -Uli AMD64 3200+ Venice Maxtor 250 GB SATA hdd 2 gb Corsair ValueSelect ram Sapphire ATI Radeon Atlantis 9600 (using DVI) 19 inch HANNS-G HN199D LCD monitor NEC 3550 DVD Internal floppy
I partitioned the hard drive when doing a clean install of XP pro sp2 to give me room for Vista. My C: drive has XP and the D: drive has Vista. The D: drive shows 77.5 GB with 67.6 free.
So far, Vista seems to work very well. I like the interface-- seems pretty clean and uncluttered.
Anyway, that was my installation experience.

You can force the SATA driver to be loaded by pressing Shift-F10 while in the window where you select the hard drive where you want to install Vista, then going where is your driver and typing "drvload my_driver.inf"
-- Christophe Roy