Hello, a friend bought a copy of Vista Ultimate and has asked me to help him install it, he was giving an old p3 pc which had a 10 gig harddrive init, we removed and replaced the harddrive with a 80gig. heres the problem when i put the vista dvd into the dvd and i boot the pc it says "press any key to boot from CD..." so i press enter and it sayd "Loading files" when it gets to end of loading files i get an error, something along the lines of "Loading failed, a hardware or software changed may have caused this please contact your administrator" i cleared the CMos i changed the PSU i checked the wires/cables i replaced the cables from HD to mobo i repcaed cable from CD/DVD to mobo i used another 20gig harddrive i done everything i can and im still getting the same problem, we know the pc the worked because it was only recently that he had installed xp pro on the old 10gig harddrive. the LEDs on the mobo during boot go red/grem in particular (boot) sequence then they all go green when it it loads. he also says that he was able to install vista on the 10gig before he replaced it with xp. Im confused what could be the problem here? and help/advice please? Sorry but i do not know the spec of this pc, i can not see any make/model details on the board. Thanks,

i Just read somewhere that if i installed XP on the harddrove before attempting to install Vista then the Vista boot loader will be messed up is this so? so apparently theres a program called VistaBootPro which could resolve the problem im going to attempt to install the drives into another machine and format them and them put them back into the other machine and see if that helps. can anyone expand on this and tell me whats happening here and why the bootloader gets messed up if you installed xp on the drive before Vista? thanks,

You're supposed to install xp on the drive before Vista, and installing VistaBootPro in XP will allow you to dual boot. However, if you only have a P3 cpu, I don't think you'll be able to get Vista Ultimate to work. Also, how much RAM do you have ?

It seems pointless to me to put Vista Ultimate on a P3 especially if it is under a 1Ghz chip. I have Vista Basic running on a 1Ghz P3 but I added over 1Gb RAM to get it to run anywhere near smoothly enough to use. I doubt he could actually install Vista on the 10Gb drive as about 15Gb is the minimum space needed during the install of Vista.

Why would he want to put ultimate edition on an old pc? For starters you are going to need at least 1gb of ram, a grpahics card that supports DX 9 pixel shadder 2.0 or higher and a processor that's at least 1ghz and that's just to get it running we aren't talking about getting it running smoothly. He is much better off running XP and if he is getting an error when he tries to install Vista then that's telling you that Vista doesn't support something in his hard ware. I'm willing to bet it's rejecting his motherboards chipset, if you changed out everything but that.

Yes you guys have made some very fair comments, i did say to him when he first asked me to install Vista, that this machine was no way capable of running it but he insisted. he claims that his old harddrive which was actually 80gig not 10 as i stated had vista on it and it ran pretty well, dont know if he is being serious or not, all he really wanted it for was to test software that he writes on, no internet no other software. he has decided to ditch the idea thankfully and build a better machine for the purpose. Just one question still remains though, if i buy a brand new harddrive and wanted to install Vista on it, do i have to install XP first as suggested above? or can you just do it straight off? Thanks,

You do if you have to buy the vista upgrade disc.