Building Friend A Computer

[ignisrenovatio]

So I am not sure if I am supposed to be posting this here or not, but this forum seemed closest.

I am working on building a computer for my friend, and I am having an interesting issue. He purchased a case, motherboard, and cpu from a co-worker. I had the rest of the components. So I began to piece everything together. I have everything all set to go and then it comes time to put in the hard drive. The spare hard drive that I have is missing hal.dll. This isn't too much of an issue, I simply plug the hard drive into my computer and install windows vista on it (Yuck, buts its the only spare I had). On my computer it boots just fine, so I plug it into the computer I am building for my friend. Now, when I turn on his pc, it goes through the BIOS screen just fine, then goes to a black screen with a white loading bar at the bottom of the screen. There is no text, no nothing, and the screen simply stays right there.

Any ideas on why this would happen? I looked in the boot menu to make sure that the hdd is the primary boot device. When that didn't work I tried booting from the same cd I used to install Vista, and this simply did not work, and the same black screen with white loading bar appears. Any suggestions?

What I know about the components:
-500g Hitachi HDD (Pretty old, from 2006)
-Abit NF7-A2 mobo
-?? CPU (I havent resorted to pulling everything off and looking yet)
-1.5g Total PNY RAM

 

[hunter315]

Install the OS on the machine it will be living on, when you installed it on your machine it installed the drivers for your motherboard, not for his, do a clean install of it on his machine and it should work fine. Since he only has 1.5GB of ram in that system it might take vista quite a while to load up its install files, i remember the vista install took quite a while when i did it, much longer than 7 took so try being patient and see if it can boot off the CD and install it.

 

[ignisrenovatio]

I tried doing this, however when I do this, it does not boot the cd. I have the CD-Rom selected as the primary boot device and tried making the hdd the secondary boot device, as well as removing any secondary boot device.

I get the line that reads "Press any key to boot from CD" and then it waits about five seconds and continues to the black screen with white loading bar, despite my pressing of keys to initiate this setup.

Any ideas why this might be?

 

[cmcghee358]

If it's a USB keyboard, verify that USB Legacy is enabled in the BIOS.

 

[ignisrenovatio]

Thanks, I would not have even thought of that to be honest. However now I have yet another problem.

It boots past this black screen and reads "loading windows". After this point, I get the windows progress bar. After that I finally get to a screen that has the windows vista colored background and a mouse cursor, but nothing else ever appears on the screen from there.

 

[cmcghee358]

How long are you waiting? Because sometime's it can take like 30 mins depending on the DVD-RW drive speed. Let it sit, go eat or something and come back.

 

[ignisrenovatio]

Last time I sat there for about 2 hours.

 

[ScrewySqrl]

hrm.

Maybe try loading Ubuntu? its a free ISO at least