Windows Vista Installation Sucks

I like Windows Vista. A lot. I’ve been running it full time on multiple computers since September. But the installation process sucks. I’ve done it 7 or 8 times now, and it only just worked once. That was the first time I installed it on my Averatec laptop as an upgrade from Win XP to Vista RC1. Every other install and reinstall has involved multiple restarts, rollbacks, and hard reboots for hours to get a copy up and running.

Today I went out and bought the retail copy of Vista Ultimate. I’d be content with running the release candidates until I can get cheap copies after I start the new job, but RC2 won’t install on my main desktop. It chain reboots after installation, and I ended up reverting back to RC1. RC1′s search indexer spontaneously stops every 5-10 minutes, which makes the instant search useless, and that’s one of the features of Vista I want most. So I planned to go from RC1 to the retail version to get that… and the neat video desktop “Ultimate Extra”.

Unfortunately that didn’t work. Like RC2, after multiple forced reboots to get the installer to finish running, Vista tried to boot then hung and the computer restarted. I tried the recovery software that comes on the DVD, which worked once when a nasty program overwrote an important Windows file, but that made things much, much worse… after an hour of the MS recovery program sitting on the same screen seemingly doing nothing, I gave up on it and hit the reset button. There were no operating systems to boot when the computer came back up. My main drive had no partitions and no data. The Vista DVD saw no installations to upgrade or repair.

I booted into XP from another hard drive (I swapped my old primary drive to secondary when I first installed RC1 in September) and tried to see if I could somehow recover the drive. XP’s Disk Management control panel not only saw no partitions, but wasn’t able to even touch the drive. No initialization, no partitioning, no formatting. I ran Paragon’s partition software which has several recovery and undelete features, but it too was unable to do anything. I ended up having to start fresh with the MaxBlast CD that came with the drive.

I lost all my e-mail since September. And a few hours of code that wasn’t checked into a repository. Not much else really; all my media is on a 500GB external drive, QuickBooks was backed up, important documents were on a separate drive since I didn’t move them with Vista in the first place, and programs I can always reinstall.

Starting from a fresh drive, Vista Ultimate installed in under 20 minutes. Now that it’s running, I have to install again, since I bought the upgrade version and don’t have a key for a clean install (you can’t just put in an XP CD like previous OS upgrades; it actually has to be installed starting from the old OS). Luckily there’s a now-well-known loophole in that Vista upgrades from itself as if it’s a fully licensed OS to start with, so I opted to not enter a license key and go with a 30-day trial for the first install, and will enter the key on the upgrade from that.

Hopefully that doesn’t blow up.

Posted on February 3, 2007 in Personal

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  • http://www.clevertools.com Jason

    Sorry to hear that. I think I’m going to wait on vista for a while. I was one of those people who didnt upgrade to XP for a few years- I liked Windows 2000. I’ll wait for the major kinks to get worked out personally.

  • http://www.dbstract.com Roger Stringer

    Yeah, I’ve upgraded two machines to Vista, my main machine at home and my PC at the office. One has Home Premium, the other has Business.
    Funny part is I put Business on the home machine and Home Premium on the office one, but they are running fine now after I finally got my drivers back again.
    Biggest pain is my Fang stopped working properly because they haven’t made a new zboard engine for Vista yet. Had all the keys programmed just right for WoW too :(

  • Dan

    Haven’t had time to make a new post here; I’ve been so busy this week I had to schedule every minute of every day from 9AM to midnight. Anyway, Vista installed just fine the second time (minus all the data I lost) and runs just great. No more search indexer crashes like RC1 had, no lockups like RC2 had.

    The one big disappointment was that DreamScene wasn’t included nor available as a Vista Ultimate Extra despite Bill Gates showing it off at CES weeks ago and that being one of the main reasons I was willing to pay to go from the RC to retail. I did get my hands on a beta copy, and used Windows Movie Maker to take a clip from an anime series opening and make that video my desktop.