Vista anytime upgrade horror - SATA sucks!
- From: Arthur Hoornweg <antispam.hoornweg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:16:02 +0200
I've had my new notebook with Vista (a Fujitsu Siemens with Vista
home premium) for two weeks now. Yesterday I noticed that some
essential stuff is missing in Vista HP (such as the security policy editor)
which I really need to test my NT services. So I decided to give the
"online anytime upgrade" in the control panel a go.
I acquired a Vista "Ultimate" upgrade licence online for a hefty 199
Euros, made a full Acronis Trueimage backup of both the system
and the license file on a network file server and started the upgrade
process.
Downloading the additional files took an hour over my 4 megabit DSL
connection. The automatic upgrade process itself, including the latest
updates from Microsoft, took another whopping 5 hours and involved
half a dozen reboots. At the end of the process, I properly registered
the operating system online.
The first thing I noticed when the notebook was finally up and running
was that the welcome tune sounded choppy. Also, the movement of
the mouse cursor wasn't smooth anymore. Attempts to play a video
dvd resulted in choppy sound and jerky video. Something was interfering
with the system. I travel a lot so I like to be able to use the notebook
for multimedia as well, this situation clearly wasn't satisfactory for me.
I did some searching on Google but found no solution that worked for
me. An upgrade like this is a rather radical change to the
system, it's not just a matter of returning to the previous system
restore point.
I decided to deinstall and reinstall the audio driver. The notebook then
bluescreened upon every reboot and did a core dump each time.
I then did a "last known good" reboot. Bluescreen.
I started Windows in safe mode and deleted the audio driver again.
After the next reboot Windows automatically re-installed the audio driver
and bluescreened again. Stubborn bugger.
I then tried to boot from a Vista DVD (which contains all Vista versions)
to do a repair installation, only to find that it wouldn't detect my SATA
controller. It needed drivers and asked for a medium.
I inserted the drivers CD that came with the notebook but it contained
only some setup.exes which weren't really helpful. These guys from
Fujitsu must assume that Windows is already up and running when you
install the SATA drivers....
I extracted the driver files from the executables (using Winrar, great
tool) on a separate computer, copied the driver files onto a USB stick
and tried my luck again. Bummer. They didn't even match my Sata
controller. I give up.
I promise myself that the very next thing on my shopping list is going to
be a USB box for SATA drives.
The bootable Acronis Trueimage rescue cd is brilliant. It recognized my
SATA controller and network card immediately (phew!).
Restoration went smooth as silk. Surely it must be Linux-based...
But how the heck am I going to get that expensive upgrade installed
properly?
--
Arthur Hoornweg
(In order to reply per e-mail, please just remove the ".net"
from my e-mail address. Leave the rest of the address intact
including the "antispam" part. I had to take this measure to
counteract unsollicited mail.)
.
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