Removing incomplete Vista installs form HD

Hello tibailey several ways of doing this depending on what you want to be left with. Now I can tell you from experience if you want to get Vista back on unless you have the original disk then there is no ISO you can access though having said that why would you need Vista?

So do you have some way of wiping / erasing that drive? as in access to another machine with an OS running? Just as an afterthought how old is the drive?

I think a good idea would be taking a look at the Disk Management tool in order to see just how many partitions are on the drive. 3 failed Vista installs could be to just one other primary or you could have two or three in additional to the 7 C primary.

When you mention "fiddling with the bios" I have the suspicion that you left the optical drive as first in the boot order or with more then one hard drive installed a second or third drive got bumped to the default position at the top of the list of drives and why the previous installation attempts are not being able to complete themselves!

We could still use a look at the Disk Management tool if you can reply back with a snipping tool capture of how that looks to see what partitions as well as how many drives are installed there. When going to install Windows from dvd one tip to save on booting problems is to call up the boot device menu to select the CD Rom option when going to install Windows rather then going back and forth into the bios setup to change the boot order.

That will be a simple press on the F key assigned for that right at post time where you then select the drive you will be booting from. On Asus boards for example that would be the F8 key while other makes use the F4, F11, F12 keys instead. On Gigabyte you press the F12. This brings up the one time session option to select which drive you want.

By leaving the OS drive as the default in the bios once you select the optical drive and the installer copies all setup files over to the main drive you then see the installation proceed on and complete itself once the initial restart sees the installation continue when the hard drive loads without the need to rush back into the bios.

tibailey said:

Sorry for not getting back sooner, just got the email (2-5-2013) that replies had been posted.
gregrocker, yep, I finally realized that after the Win 7 disk loaded on its own.
IC, went ahead and did the "wipe clean' and started with just Win 7 on the formatted partition. I'll clean out the old partition when I finally have solved this additional problem: I can't get audio drivers to load. Have a MB tha comes with Realtek integrated. I do not have room for a sound card so I must go with the MB set up. I do not have sound. I do have the MS HDMI drivers loaded.(tried uninstalling them then rebooting, drivers loaded and ready to use.) But still no sound. Went to Realtek's site and downloaded their HD sound drivers and restarted, still no joy. What more do I have to do to get the Realtek thumping along nicely so I can get back to life as I knew it?

Get an Asus Xonar DG card and forget the rest (and the grief) :)

tibailey said:

Don't have the slots for it: Asus Xonar DG card. I agree Asus makes some nice equiptment. I have dual ATI 4800 graph. cards. the extra slot is 'tween the cards me man! Not to be done.

Yep that is a shame Ti I would have had a similar problem with a Gigabyte board if I had dual GPU's - no room.

I suppose one GPU perhaps an upgrade? is out of the question either that or if it is the mobo giving up well it will have to go eh?