tautkiller, Thank you for using the Dell Community Forum. Boot into the bios by pressing the F2 screen. Once in the bios arrow down to Onboard Devices and hit enter. From there arrow down to SATA Operation. You will then see at the top of the screen ATA and AHCI. Change that to I believe AHCI. If it is set to AHCI already then set it to ATA. Exit out of the bios screen and run setup again. It should complete the install. Once you have complete the setup you will need to go back in and change it back to what it was before changing.   
I am trying to reinstall windows vista ultimate on my laptop as for some reason my hardrive got wiped out I don not even have the option to do a factory image restore I tried using the vista cd that came with notebook but it only goes so far and then it freezes I ran the full diagnostics and there are no hardware issues found that are causing the problem no bad sectors in the hard drive either it just freezes up while completing the installation process I have disconnected all attached external equipment and that does not change anything. Can someone please help as I have been trying to do this for almost a week and of course dell support is of no assistance to me as I think I know more about computers than they do                       My system is an inspiron 1720                  intel core2duo 2.20ghz                    4 gb of ram                   nvidia 8600gt                    220 gb hard drive
clean install for windows vista