Hi guys, My girlfriends brother recently gave the Windows 7 RC a try on his Dell laptop and shortly after installing it he started to experience a couple of strange quirks (e.g. the left shift and control keys stopped working). He asked me to sort it out for him so I simply recommended that I reinstall a copy of Vista home premium, which the laptop came with in the first place. The reasons for this were simple - whilst 7 is clearly superior to Vista, his copy of 7 was a RC and it would mean me installing vista for him again next march anyway (when the RC expires), as he's unlikely to fork out for a copy of 7. Anyways, I popped the vista disk in the drive, rebooted the machine and booted from the dvd drive. The installation startup began as normal but before any prompts came up the installation halted and I was simply left with a command prompt. Unfortunately, the keyboard wouldn't operate correctly (even with a usb one) so it was impossible to enter any commands or check anything. Slightly puzzled, I tried my own 64 bit vista disk - same thing. Out of curiosity, I tried a Windows 7 RC disk and again, same thing. I then ran 'Gparted', and reformatted the main partition (to NTFS) and tried all the disks again with the same result. Finally I tested a Windows XP disk and even that failed to get past the 'preparation' stage - just before the installation 'proper' starts, it will blue screen and say that it has encountered an error. As a final test, I disabled any non-essential devices in the BIOS and tried all the above again, with exactly the same result. Feeling frustrated, I grabbed a Ubuntu disk and guess what? Installed first time, without a hitch! The only significant thing I did notice was the left shift and control keys were not functional. The only thing I can think is that it's possibly a hardware (i.e. keyboard) fault that Windows installations are not happy to 'accept' which causes the installation to halt and that maybe Ubuntu is more tolerant of said fault? Need some ideas though guys Cheers
Hmm.. after reading that I understand your frustration. Have you still got the Dell recovery partion on that machine? It's likely that you haven't are you able to swap another drive into the machine? Or can you get a copy of Bart PE. Its a tool I have used for a while now and also sometimes use it at work. Just google "Bart PE" One issue i have had with Dell & HP laptops of when I have gone to install any version of Windows is it doesn't find the hard drive. This is normally down to the fact that SATA is turned on. In most laptops they use an IDE controller but have been converted to use newer drives try to turn that option in the BIOS if you can.
Thanks for the tips, I'll give those a go. I do have the Dell recovery partition on the drive but I was under the impression that you needed a working windows install to run the dell recovery utility. If there's another means of utilising the recovery partition, I'd be interested to find out ... EDIT: Lol, just read up on BartPE, that should get me a working XP environment. Hopefully I can run the dell recovery utility from there.
