Well I assembled my first computer today! I was amazed that there were no catastrophic errors, despite the fact that I nearly killed myself trying to install that freaking cpu cooler. Anyway, I pop in my self-burned Vista Business 64 DVD and go through the installation. All goes well until I get to the 21% point. I then get an error message that says something along the lines of "The installation files could not be found. Make sure the file is available and restart the installation." It also has an error code 0x8007045D. A Yahoo! search of the error code only gives me a windows media player error.

Now, I downloaded this copy of Vista from my school via the MSDN academic alliance. I am willing to bet my crappy DVD burner messed up the installation disk and all I have to do is request a free (+ s&h) DVD from MSDN but I want to make sure that is the problem.

Until I get Vista up, I must use my Ubuntu 8.04 live CD.

"I nearly killed myself trying to install that freaking cpu cooler."

It wouldn't be that bad, would it, LOL. Try to see if you have all the correct drivers for Sata / Raid drives during installation. I encountered similar error before, it crashed in random point of the install, and I almost thought it's the north bridge overheating. But turned out it was because I forgot to load the Raid driver for Vista 64. Once loaded, problem solved. I was running Raid 0, not sure if you're too.

Well I just have a single SATA drive in there and it came with no driver cd. I am going to try re-downloading and re-burning. Too bad the downloader only works on Windows, which I don't have at the time!

And that stock Intel cooler was evil. The multi-lingual instructions just said to push the pins down until you heard a click but I pushed as hard as I could on one of them and I never heard a click. The CPU is idling at 44 C so I guess I got it right.

I agree with User. you have to install SATA Driver when/during the install, press F6. SATA drivers are on the Motherboards Drivers Disc. Something like "Make drivers disc".

Darn. I just erased my Vista DVD and I am in the process of downloading another copy on an old 98 system I have. If the installer needed SATA drivers, how was it able to copy 23% of the files to the HDD?

"If the installer needed SATA drivers, how was it able to copy 23% of the files to the HDD?"

That's what I was wondering last time. I think the reason is Vista already have some kind of default driver for Sata and Raid, but it won't bug out until some point down the installation. I tried the install 3 or 4 times, all crashed during different points, that's why I thought it was some kind of overheating. Until, I used the right drivers, it installed completely, did that again just to make sure, again successful with no problem. So for me, it's the driver. Good luck.

Well there are no SATA drivers on my motherboard's CD, just RAID. I have re-downloaded (3 hrs) and re-burned (1.5 hrs at 0.5x) the iso file and now the install finishes the "copying files" part in 2 seconds and errors out (same code) at 0% on the "expanding files" part. More internet searching only found me one person on this planet who had a similar problem and the solution someone gave him was to copy the install files to a HDD because burning a Vista install DVD can be finicky. So I used my Ubuntu Live CD and tried unarchiving the iso file but it only extracted a readme file saying the iso contents were of a UDF filesystem (what???) so now I am stumped. So much for first impressions of Vista...

Oh I also attempted the install using an ancient PATA DVD drive I had but still no luck.

EDIT: Removed a part about partitioning my HDD into a UDF because it failed epically.

How do I get my BIOS to boot from a small partition on my HDD that contains all the contents of the ISO file? I keep getting an error saying the disk is not bootable. and to insert a bootable floppy disk, even though I didn't tell it to boot from the floppy drive.

I had a similar problem back in March this year when I tried to install Vista on my
old folks new pc i built for them. I had to reinstall their XP for them.
I gave them my old MoBo (Asus P5W Deluxe) and my E6600 cpu. It's the least
I could do for them. After all, they brought me into this world

I posted a similar thread back then too, and not much could be done.However, I didn't
install the SATA Drivers. Purely because I'd had vista installed (without sata drivers)
when I used the motherboard. I feared it had something to do with the harddisk tho
(which I also gave them - 80GB Maxtor UGGHH). I really do think this was the root
of the problem that HDD!

I got it to work! YAY! How you ask? I just kept burning more and more copies of the DVD until one worked. I had a feeling it was my laptop's bad burner. I made seven coasters out of all this but at least I got Vista installed.

i am getting the same error code but i am using an oem off the shelf copy of vista home premium 64bit and i cant firgure a solution out lol....

Well at least you can contact the OEM for assistance. They shuold at least have some ideas as to the problem