installing vista

Well, I fell for it and went and bought Vista from PC World on the first day of release for the home computer. Partly because I was passing and the PC World opposite Warren Street was heaving with Microsofties taking the day off work and outnumbering customers...

So, I get home and discover I need a new graphic card; no surprise there. Quick trip to eBay via the ATI site and I am expecting a Radeon X1600 to arrive in a couple of days - I ought to be able to manage without Aero for that period of time.

Looks like the Sonnet (Marvell) SATA HBA is in need of a driver. Google takes me to a deeper level on the Sonnet site and I am all good. Same for the Canon Scanner and the Netgear wireless card - although I have to accept NetGear's stern beta testing warning to get at it. All safe and sound on a USB disk.

Next stop the File Transfer wizard. Why not; it might even work unlike the XP and OS X ones I have tried in the past. it wont be a problem if they dont make it er apart from the family photos I just remembered I havent backed up in a while. Ooops. Here's hoping Microsoft QA have done their bit.

Right. Here we go. OK, I have Red Hat installed on the same disk as XP and it is time to give the whole disk to Vista as it is bound to want more space than XP did. Hmm, cant delete or resize partitions when you launch the install from within XP. No problem. Reboot from the DVD.

Hmm, I type in the license and it says as its an upgrade I have to install from within XP. Bollocks. OK. I must have missed a break point in the install where I can reorganise the drive partions, let's do it again.

Nope, I am stuck with installing on the XP C: drive by the looks. Nuts. I am sure that previous versions allowed you to do a clean install from CD having determined there was a previous version of Windows present. This is a pain in the arse. And it has hosed GRUB.

Ah well, maybe there is a clever Partition Magic app in Vista that will allow me to sort this out later. Its expanding files at the moment 27%...

I have a sneaking suspicion that I may need to go back to the XP installer to repartition the whole drive NTFS and go through all this again. Bugger. I hope not.