[deleted anon]

Have you tried updating your bios?

Vista wouldn't even install on my asus machine until I installed a new bios - now it runs like a dream

Hmm, I was going to try that actually but I haven't got a floppy drive and I couldn't get it to do it from my USB stick.

Doing a Vista install like that will simply put the new Vista bootloader onto the old boot drive and add a "Previous Version of Windows" option to the boot menu. It will do this even if you installed the actual OS onto a separate hard-drive from the boot drive.

Strange... I didn't see anything like that and I've booted in to XP for the past week with no such menu :( Come to think of it though, I have seen those menu's at work. Hmm. Well I will flash the updated bios and then reinstall. Any other ideas however?

How long did you watched the blink cursor? Because I thought it hanged aswell, but it just took really long to start up for the first time on my laptop...

Toolmaker

If I put my machine (Vista Business) into hybrid sleep, wait for it to sleep the hard disks, then switch it off at the mains, the next time I switch it on I get the vey slow boot and blinking white _ cursor "problem" (fix: enable true hibernation with powercfg /hibernate on). Not a helpful fix in your situation, but I second the advice to wait and see what it does.

I left it while I went to have a shower and dinner. I tried to flash the bios last night with the Asus EZFlash software. My bios version is really outdated. I stuck my USB stick in, (I read that it is able to detect them) as well as putting a copy on to my C drive, loaded up EZFlash from the bios menu. The thing thinks for a couple of seconds, retrieving drive information, but only drives A, B and C are there. No thumb stick and when I go to browse the C drive nothing is listed as being on it :S Arg this is such a pain in the bum. Is my motherboard stuffed? Should I even bother trying to use floppy? (I would have to borrow a drive from work)

My asus motherboard let me flash it from within windows - have you tried something like that?

Where do you go to do it?