PAQ

[Julian]

OK, I've had enough. I mean, completely and utterly enough. I spent Sunday with three different programs, none of which seem to work under vista. Since one is the Komplete 5 install, this is pretty serious. So, I have a system with a Vista partition, an empty partition and a second hard drive which actually has all of my music samples on it. Any suggestions as to what I should do? Full rebuild, install onto partition 1, install onto partition 2?

I can't be the only person who has come to the conclusion Vista is actually actively hostile to their computer.

(Entertaining detail: the CD check routines used by some software fail to detect my Lite-On drive under vista. Apparently this is fixable via a firmware upgrade. Which would be fine, only the firmware upgrade can't detect it either...)

[admin]

Hi Julian,


it seems quite a lot of people are uipgrading from Vista to XP....


I prefer to have Vista and XP on different HDs, because the Vista install changes the MBR, so XP on a Vista System Disk can only be booted via teh Vista Boot loader. If you uninstall Vista....


However, if your second HD is full of samples you probably don't want to mess with that.

So I'd indstall XP onto the second Partition on the Vista HD. I'm not quite certain if this will re-write the MBR (in which case Vista will become inaccessible) but XP will be fine; or if it does not - in which case you can set up the Vist loader to give you a noption of XP. There is an option in th eUser friendly verions of teh Vist Boot loader to re-write the MBR, which yu ocould then use to make XP standalone prior to uninstalling Vista.



Peter

[Julian]

For some reason, it's never that easy. Would you believe I've had to open the case twice to fix this? (Just as well it's pretty easily serviceable really...)

The comedy of errors runs like this:
1) Insert XP disc
2) Install XP on blank partition
3) XP needs to reboot
4) *BANG*

The problem being, that Vista insisted on AHCI, which XP doesn't support. So, I've got a MBR pointing to an OS that is incompatible with the bootstrapper. Dead machine. Tried rebooting, switching BIOS settings back and forth until.

5) Swap the S-ATA cables on your drives round.
6) Install on your Music drive.
7) Connect to internet
*BANG*

There's no network card that XP recognizes. I consider exactly how I can download the drivers when I've got no internet connection. This one had me stumped for an hour.

9) Cannibalize that junk machine in the corner for its old network card.

Needless to say, by the time I'd reached (4), I'd given up any hope of ever dual booting the machine, so I've now got a virgin XP machine running IE6 (until I fix it...) upon which I'm writing this post. Add this to my known skill at opening up computers... In short, as I said at the start, it's never that easy. I hope someone finds this funny, because it really wasn't. Now all I need to do is install Cubase, BFD, Komplete...

[admin]

Hi Julian,


My installs of Vista have been IDE, not AHCI, for the reasons you give. I don't know why your version of Vista insists on AHCI.


If ypu want any help....



Peter

[Julian]

I have no idea either. I /think/ it might be something to do with the partioning. I know that sounds strange, but there are a couple of odd things with the partions on the (original) master driver. For one, there's more than one partition. For another, I think there may be a "dud" partion right at the start. None of this makes sense, I know, especially since the partions got created by the Vista installer in the first place.

Anyway, thanks for the offer, but I now have a working computer again (in fact, in some ways, for the first time in a year...). I've pretty much given up any hope of dual-booting.

Ironically, for all that Vista's speedy boot sequence is trumpted, the benefits are entirely outweighed by how long AHCI takes to boot... The machine is appreciably faster on XP. (And it's not a bad machine...)

[admin]

Hi Julian,


Vista allocates Partition boundaries in different places from XP and earlier OSs.

This is in preparation dor a new generation of HDs whose cylinder sizes (measured in blocks) and block sizes will be different.


The result is that on current HDs, Visyta Partition s do not fall on cylinder boundaries.


I would not allow Vista to partition a HD until we have reached a point where all the HD on a machine conform to this new standard, and no OS other than Vista might ever need to run on it.



Peter

[Julian]

/That/ answers a lot. It doesn't exactly advertise the fact that its concept of partioning is different from every other operating system you're running. I'm not inclined to run the experiment, but I suspect that the whole AHCI and onwards problems were caused by it.

Thought something was funny about my partitions...

[admin]

Hi Julian,


Yes.


What MS are doing in perfectly reasonable - but their failure to flag it up in Big Red Letters, and their failure to provide any Backwards Compatability Option is frankly inexcusable.


It's not like the don't have the code to do it the old way....



You have to beleve that the tek side ended up beleiveing the marketing hype, and assumed everybody would jump on the Vista bandwagon and never look back.

Even though performance in inferior and whole tranches of stuff won't work under Vista.


A fully working 32 bit application environment, plus a shell that would allow you to run 32 bit device drvers would have made a huger difference.


Actually... they still would.




Peter

[/code]