Trouble Booting & Installing from CD/DVD

[Tonymandala]

Hi everyone, great forum, hope someone can help.

This may be two separate problems perhaps ?

I have a multiboot system 3 partitions XP on 'C' & 'D' Vista on 'M'
Its a tower with asus A7N8X-X / AMD XP2400, 2gb DDR Ram

Some time ago i reformatted 'D' and installed XP with sp3 from a boot CD.
As (apparently) happens in these cases the Vista boot file was overridden by the new XP boot ini, a little googling later... i booted from the vista DVD and chose the repair option, hey presto all is well.

A couple of months later i tried again to boot into Vista partition and it wouldn't boot.
I put in the same vista DVD and it won't boot from that CD anymore.
I put in a different Vista DVD and it booted but the repair was unsuccessful.

A few weeks later i thought, time to reinstall Vista.
Put in the original Vista DVD wont boot, (as before)
Put in new Vista DVD, Boots, loading files (white progress bar completes) but then
a black screen with the Vista loading square in the middle but it freezes, no green
progress bar, nothing. Borrowed another DVD, same.

Then i tried to boot from my XP CD, that won't boot either !
I tried the CD in another computer and it boots up no problem !
I can boot windows live CD (Bart PE) and other 'tools' CDs i have made.

Question 1. Can anyone think of a reason that i can boot from some CDs but not others that did work previously ??? (not dirty as works on other machine).

Question 2. Why does the Vista DVD no longer load on the computer.

I have looked around for solutions, i have no idea about Question 1.
Q2. Some say that it could be a problem with USB or Legacy devices ?
I do have a USB mouse and USB legacy enabled in BIOS, but i did before all this on my original install and Vista repair?
I will get a PS2 mouse to try but find it hard to believe that Vista won't install because of that ? I have seen a post saying they suspected disk.sys file in a similar situation. Is this likely ? Do i extract from i386 and replace ?
The disk is loading on some CD/DVDs.

The only hardware i have changed since original install is another 1GB of Ram, exactly the same as was already installed.

I have re-flashed the BIOS which changed nothing.

I have 2 CD/DVD Drives, seems the same in either drive.

I am assuming that the files needed to load either OS are on the root of drive 'C'.
I may be able to use BCD Edit to modify these, i'm looking into that now.
Surely the Vista DVD doesn't require any other files to load as there would be none in a fresh Install new HDD ?

There is no problem with my working XP OS on 'C' & 'D'
I suppose i can try and load the Vista DVD while in XP rather from boot
Will it restart though? will i loose my XP boot files and then be stuck as i can't boot from windows disk ?

I am hoping it is something simple i've missed, will post any developments.

Thanks in advance for any ideas,

Cheers, Tony

 

[Tonymandala]

I have tried disconnecting all USB devices.
I have disabled USB Lagacy support (Keyboard & Mouse) in BIOS
No effect.

Is it possible that Vista setup copies files to the hard drive but then cannot read them ?
Does anyone know to where they are copied ? Do they require a certain amount of space ?
I know in XP setup copies files and then restarts into that directory, if the drive cannot boot for any reason then setup fails. There is no rebooting here but could it be something similar perhaps ?

I still have XP so this is not really urgent but i would appreciate it if someone could have a stab at it or even a wild guess to give me something to work on.

Thanks a lot, Tony.