So, I’ve been fighting ALL day, and this is literally from before noon until three in the morning, with Windows Vista… Let’s pull the menu down and see how the battle progressed.
First, if you didn’t know.. Pre-SP1 install DVD’s for Vista x64 do not contain the KB929777 update which fixes a blue screen of death problem that’s supposedly associated with computers with more than three gigabytes of ram installed. My system has four gigabytes and I’m required to take out all of my DIMMs aside from one that I need to boot with. I’ve tried with using two gigabytes and three gigabytes installed and it crashes every time. Since I have a MASSIVE Coolermaster GeminII heatsink, I have to pull the pair of 120mm fans off just to get to the modules.. Might as well make it into a full teardown and remove this years five pounds worth of dust! I dropped a good two degrees celcius during idle because of the removal!
Alright, let’s install! Sweet, I watch the grass grow while it copies and extracts the necessary files. Finally the message I’ve been waiting for! “Windows will restart your system in 09 seconds” Sounds like a plan champ! It goes through the boot process and I wait… I wait… Still waiting… I think to myself, “Hmm, black screen… No HDD activity? I wonder what’s going on here.. I’ll give it a few.” So I proceed to start the one hundred and eleven megabyte download of the nVidia drivers for my video card and still a blue screen. My laptop is even looking at me with a stare that just screams, “See? Linux doesn’t pull that crap with you!”.
Well, I had to restart the entire process.. Wait for the copy and expanding and bleh bleh bleh bleh.. Finally after thefourth attempt and dropping the ram to 533mhz, it worked. Slow as moses, but it worked. It wasn’t the ram though, that didn’t work on it’s third try.
Well, I’m FINALLY at a desktop, no Aero, no sound.. This almost is starting to sound like my hardware vs. Linux. Just ask my Sound Blaster X-Fi about that sometime. Well, those are fixable however. I got the sound blaster pushing sound with the integrated HD audio device so I could hear my MP3 files while working.
So I get my video drivers installed, and aero has never looked so good. I got everything I “need” installed for schooling however. So, it’s running… Now what? Well I went from having Vista and Ubuntu on a single “physical” drive with different partitions to having them on two different “physical” devices totally. Time for some GRUB action….
Well, this was all but horrible. I couldn’t get grub to register with the windows partition at ALL on the new drive… I tried everything.. It kept giving me problems with locating the device. Finally, someone led me on to remembering “sudo fdisk -l” which listed the physical devices and thier partitions. Alright… /dev/sdc/ is what I’m looking at.. Should be right at (hd2) …
Well after visiting the ubuntu forums and cross referencing posts and my own findings, it FINALLY booted windows through grub… And Now I can use my Raptor for my all of my Virtual Box needs.
Let’s just agree on one thing, the GeminII is a GIANT heatsink, and it’s bolted to my CASE on the other side of the mobo so it won’t break my motherboard. It works EXTREMELY well and the pair of Silverstone fans blow enough air to cool the giant “Circupipe” northbridge heatisnk as well as the ram. So installing those three module was, well to be honest, a two hour process with TIGHT finger movement between the GeminII and 8800GTS. Miserable… LOL
On a side note, I did finally install the screens for the two side air intakes! I didn’t break anything and it all works now. Now it’s time to do some hard drive searching! I’m going to be installing a one terrabyte hard drive for space concerns. I’ll be able to have a full backup of my “fresh” Windows install and won’t have to deal with this again!
To round it up, I shortened the story greatly. All together I have put in over fifteen hours worth of work into into this process. I’ll have to download a total of about 1.4GB of files just to get it up to date.. Both service packs (stand alones this time), video drivers, sound drivers, drivers for the motherboard, and this all doesn’t count into the misc upgrades to windows like dreamscene and the like. All in all, it’s nice to have a fresh install going. This time however, I’m setting it up so I don’t have to go through this process again.
SX
15 hours of work that will eventually have to be repeated in 6 months to a year.
I don’t think so. Three reasons why I don’t think that’ll happen again. First the original install lasted from January 2008 until now. Second, I plan to completely set up windows… and BACK IT UP completely. That way a 15 hour process is turned into an hour or less… Last but not least, I plan to be buying Windows 7 upon it’s release and it’s already gained quite the hype of being the best operating system that Microsoft has released since MS-Dos 6.22