Text 18754, 56 rader
Skriven 2006-06-15 16:40:14 av Jeff Guerdat (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 18555 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: Vista Public beta available
===================================
Alan Zisman -> All wrote:
 AZ> The Microsoft Windows Vista public beta is now available as either a
 AZ> free download (a very large image file) or as a DVD order (with a
 AZ> relatively small shipping charge).

Welp, I downloaded the beast in both 32- and 64-bit versions.  Firefox barfed
on the 64-bit version which is >4GB so I switched to wget and had no further
problems.  (I searched for Mozilla issues with very large files and found a bug
open with the Vista beta as an example of what would fail - it's been fixed now
so a new release will have the capbility included.)

Initially, I tried to install it in VMware but the 64-bit version wouldn't
install since I was running the 32-bit XP Pro host OS.  So, I tried the 32-bit
version but wound up with an inability to get the disk set up for some reason. 
I may try some more later.

I had a partition on my big machine that had Redhat 9 installed but never used
it.  I cleaned that out and started installing the 64 bit version (I have dual
Xeon Naconas which have the 64-bit extensions built into them).  First, I had
to get RAID drivers - Vista didn't come with them for my chipset (Linux also
has this issue).  I found a beta version of an x64 driver for AMD systems (a
clue from the Internet) and it worked - WHEW!  All went well, but slowly (30
minutes to copy and expand files plus brief periods doing some of the initial
install - this on dual 2.8GHz. Xeons, 2.5GB RAM and a RAID 0 with 3 drives for
performance!  Then the first reboot and BLAMO!  First error.  Seems like it
couldn't find a file in \windows\system32.  Booting into XP allowed me to
easily browse the new partition and no system32 directory to be found.  Huh?  A
quick peek on the Internet gave me some cluse so I rebooted from the DVD and
chose system recovery options rather than to install.  Reloading the driver saw
a boot problem (no idea what but the routine fixed it- prolly saw the lack of
directory and file(s) and fixed that but who knows why it would reboot prior to
that being installed). Another reboot - now another major problem.  This time
it was the driver not being signed (yet another Google search - see how useful
this is, kids?) but the suggested command line using bcdedit (why they took a
perfectly good text file (boot.ini) and changed it into a binary database is
anyone's guess) didn't work.  Shoot, maybe this will work if I can complete the
install so I tried the other suggestion and used F8 to use the option to
temporarily disable the signature check.  Yay! That worked and off we went! 
Finally booted into the GUI.  There's several things that need to be installed
- hope XP drivers work.  For some reason my second monitor is seen as a non-PNP
device which is bogus but I have to figure out if I can change that.  A quick
try of bcdedit again gives me the same error message but it's all a work-around
anyways - the RTM version is said to have that ability removed since it's a
device driver debug mode.  I really don't want to spend $150+ for a RAID card
when I have a perfectly good one on the motherboard but it looks like that will
be the only option - Promise doesn't seem to be developing drivers for this
anymore (only a beta AMD x64 driver - never a released one).

While the Linux forum seems full of messages about ttylinux and other non-GUI
iterations, I have newer equipment and want to make it work regardless of the
OS.  Looks like my 1.5 year-old MB needs replacing.

Nahhh!  Not gonna happen...

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