can t install vista beta 2

When I boot from the DVD it does the quick 30 second "loading setup files", then I get the black screen with the Microsoft copyright info and the bar moving across horizontally showing action.
That's all I get. It stays on that screen for HOURS and never gets past it.
A8N-SLI deluxe Athlon64 3700+ 2x512mb PC3200 ram (samsung original) 300Gb SATA Maxtor Asus 7800GT
It can't be the SATA drivers because 1) they work fine for XP, and 2) it doesn't even get far enough to ask me to install any SATA drivers.
Really wanted to try this out too. Paid to have the DVD delivered. Bummer.

TheNagual -- Like you, I paid around $11.00 to have MS send me the DVDs for Vista install. Fortunately, I've been able to use these DVDs to install Vista on several machines. Having installed various OS a few hundred times, the following things come to mind:
1) You might have been sent a bad DVD. This would definitely cause the sort of hanging you described. 2) Obviously, the DVD-ROM drive could have a functionality problem -- or the Maxtor hard drive. If you can still boot into XP, or, can install XP -- you might want to do so and then run HDTune ver 2.52 on the Maxtor. (hdtune.com)
If you can contact me at my site forums, we can try a few other things as well. Thanks, Travis
-- Find me at commonmancomputing
"TheNagual" wrote:

When I boot from the DVD it does the quick 30 second "loading setup files", then I get the black screen with the Microsoft copyright info and the bar moving across horizontally showing action.
That's all I get. It stays on that screen for HOURS and never gets past it.
A8N-SLI deluxe Athlon64 3700+ 2x512mb PC3200 ram (samsung original) 300Gb SATA Maxtor Asus 7800GT
It can't be the SATA drivers because 1) they work fine for XP, and 2) it doesn't even get far enough to ask me to install any SATA drivers.
Really wanted to try this out too. Paid to have the DVD delivered. Bummer.

Maybe install from within XP to another drive and see how that works. The first thing you should see is a nice graphic background.
After you get to the install part you see it copying files and then you get to the add driver option and then it reboots and expands files and then you get eventually get to the short progress bar. At least, that's what I remember.
Good luck.

I seem to have found a fix.
I went into my bios and disabled my lan and sata controllers. The installation process worked perfectly after that, so anyone else having installation problems may want to give that a try.