Up until recently I had only ever installed Windows Vista once or twice, and I never had any problems with the installation process.

That was up until a few weeks ago, I was fixing a laptop and it had so many viruses on it that the best option would be to backup any files that I could safely and then just wipe it.

After wiping it I put in the Windows Vista installation disc and it seemed to be going fine, that was until it came to the very last section of the install. At the “Completing Installation” section the computer just stayed there, usually the computer would reboot a few time then you could use your operating system, this should only take about 3 or 4 minutes.

For me I left it over night to see if it would finish,it didn’t work, I also retried installing it again and again and it would not get past this section, it just kept on hanging on Completing Installation.

I looked through a few forums online and tried all the suggestions that worked for other people, but none of them worked for me.

Next I decided to have a look through the different boot options available on the computer and after changing a few I finally came across a setting that if you change it and run the installation again, it will complete it successfully!

When you turn on your computer press f2 to boot into your computers setup, once in that screen look around until you find a section that says “SATA Mode Selection”, change the mode to IDE, then exit and save changes.

Then just start your installation of Windows Vista again and it should complete with no problems.