Sunday, February 11, 2007
A little bit of Wow!™
Thought it was time to look at Vista so ordered the OEM version of Home Premium for £70 off www.ebuyer.com . The Vista compatibility wizard didn't like the RAID controller or the printer at home so decided to dual boot the XP machine in the office as that seemed OK.
DVD duly arrived, partitions setup with PartitionMagic and booted to the DVD. Vista installer saw all the partitions and I asked it to format the target one, which it did. It would then not install as it could find "no available supported hard drives to install Windows Vista on" or words to that effect. Presumably that excludes the one it just formatted :-) Many dual-booters have hit this problem and it is well documented on the web - the partition you intend to use has to be Active in order for Vista to install so I rebooted to XP and set the target partition as active with Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management. Rebooted to the DVD and started the install.
After installation the machine rebooted straight into Vista. I had been intending to listen to a radio show while doing this so I was somewhat miffed to find I had no sound available. "No sound devices are installed" or words to that effect - Vista doesn't recognise my Sound Blaster Audigy card - so much for "Living your digital lifestyle in full" - more like "in silence" !!!
Creative look to have Beta drivers so I'll have to get back to XP to explore which one of those I need, as the software update utility "does not yet support Vista".
While faffing with Vista I took the opportunity to download a Freespire ISO as the 3rd OS on the machine is currently Linspire. Managed to do this OK but then discovered Vista doesn't know how to burn an ISO to a CD it simply created an iso file on the CD - another coaster !
Fortunately someone is on the ball and Iso Recorder v3 is Vista compatible. CD burned OK :-)
In an attempt to add an XP / Vista boot menu option (which I had expected to appear automagically) I downloaded EasyBCD to tame the all-new Vista bootloader manager, added the XP drive and rebooted.
Got the boot options menu up but it said XP was corrupted, went into Vista, set the XP partition to Active, rebooted straight into XP. I see a pattern emerging !
So Vista gives me no sound and can't burn CD ISOs out of the box. It can partition and format a drive but not set the partition to Active and hence it can't
install into that which it just created - nice, not.
Not a good start. Now in XP trying to find Vista sound card drivers.
DVD duly arrived, partitions setup with PartitionMagic and booted to the DVD. Vista installer saw all the partitions and I asked it to format the target one, which it did. It would then not install as it could find "no available supported hard drives to install Windows Vista on" or words to that effect. Presumably that excludes the one it just formatted :-) Many dual-booters have hit this problem and it is well documented on the web - the partition you intend to use has to be Active in order for Vista to install so I rebooted to XP and set the target partition as active with Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management. Rebooted to the DVD and started the install.
After installation the machine rebooted straight into Vista. I had been intending to listen to a radio show while doing this so I was somewhat miffed to find I had no sound available. "No sound devices are installed" or words to that effect - Vista doesn't recognise my Sound Blaster Audigy card - so much for "Living your digital lifestyle in full" - more like "in silence" !!!
Creative look to have Beta drivers so I'll have to get back to XP to explore which one of those I need, as the software update utility "does not yet support Vista".
While faffing with Vista I took the opportunity to download a Freespire ISO as the 3rd OS on the machine is currently Linspire. Managed to do this OK but then discovered Vista doesn't know how to burn an ISO to a CD it simply created an iso file on the CD - another coaster !
Fortunately someone is on the ball and Iso Recorder v3 is Vista compatible. CD burned OK :-)
In an attempt to add an XP / Vista boot menu option (which I had expected to appear automagically) I downloaded EasyBCD to tame the all-new Vista bootloader manager, added the XP drive and rebooted.
Got the boot options menu up but it said XP was corrupted, went into Vista, set the XP partition to Active, rebooted straight into XP. I see a pattern emerging !
So Vista gives me no sound and can't burn CD ISOs out of the box. It can partition and format a drive but not set the partition to Active and hence it can't
install into that which it just created - nice, not.
Not a good start. Now in XP trying to find Vista sound card drivers.
# posted by PhilT @ 5:39 AM 
