Vista 32 bit Academic Upgrade - hangs on "Completing Upgrade" step

See below for specs.

I performed a clean Vista install on a SATA2 hard drive, updated the SATA
drivers and followed up with an upgrade so I could activate. The install
fails every time at the "completing upgrade" step.

I did another clean install but did not do the upgrade step as a test and
noticed frequent locking up both prior to and after installing all hardware
drivers. Installing SATA and Raid drivers (I'm not using raid) did not stop
the lockups. Installing Just the SATA driver w/o raid did not stop the
lockups.

As another test I performed a clean install using the Vista Academic upgrade
DVD on a older IDE 40g hard drive and followed it up with a reinstall upgrade
for activation but did not activate. Vista ran fine for 1 week without a
single lockup.

I also performed a clean install of XP on the SATA2 hard drive and had no
issues.

So I'm certain I've narrowed the problem to the SATA drive and the Academic
version of Visa. Other forums indicate no issues with SATA drive when using
a full version of Visa. I did try another SATA drive, but the same model,
to test if the drive was bad. The 2nd drive had the same issues.

Thorough research with the motherboard manufacturer and other Vista forums
seem to indicate installation issues specifically with the Academic version
of Vista.

Since I can't return an opened carton of Vista and it's $60 to call
Microsoft it seems I'm stuck purchasing another full version of Vista unless
I find a solution.


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Brinbane
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