oh godamnit

i did it again!
i installed vista on a pata drive while a sata drive was connected

now i removed the sata drive because its more useful to me on a diff box…

now vista wont start , bootmgr not found

well shit. booted to vista dvd, said it found an error in windows startup and would make a repair … well after reboot same error.

now i boot into dvd a second time and do startup repair again
now it tells me

number of root causes = 1

Root cause found:
Boot manager is missing or corrupt.

Repair actions: File repair
Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0×0
Time taken = 7161 ms

now it works.

lets try connecting a diff sata drive and see what trouble we get into…

false positives

i came across a puter from craigslist
the bios reports that the sata harddrive is failing.

“WARNING: Immediate back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.”

quick googling reports some people have the message and a dead drive, and some people have the message and a working drive.

That may be a feature of my BIOS, I don’t know, but I thought it was part of
the S.M.A.R.T. technology. After I get the screen with that message I can’t
go on without pressing F1 to continue, or del to enter setup. BTW it’s been
about 6 months now since this started, and there have been no other
indications of HDD failure.

i guess we’ll find out.

vista install

10:30 pm — started installation
‘if you dont select the version of vista you purchased, you will have to purchase that version later on’ … ‘enter your product key, its probably on the dvdrom which means you will have to eject it first’ …

actually the key isnt on the dvdrom. doh. i dont seem to have the envelope the dvd came in ;\ this will cause problems no doubt.’

grumble. need to learn this to help other people with vista later. vista min requirements says 15gb free, we’ll see how much it really uses.

10:40 pm — first automatic reboot.

10:50 pm — ‘please wait while windows checks your computers performance’
i think it auto rebooted while i was not paying attention

‘insert some crap about getting things done quicker’ yeah right.

10:55 pm — booted and running. impressive install time.
not so impressive install size. 17.5 gb used on drive c:

10:56 pm — turn off everything possible
1. turn off firewall, automatic updates, security center
2. set theme back to windows classic
3. spend 10 minutes finding out how to turn UAC off

laugh at how bad a name ‘ease of access center (futuristic unrecognizable wheelchair icon)’ is compared to ‘accessability options (wheelchair in a win3.1 program box icon)’

the amount of holograms on the vista dvd is insane. maybe its subliminal brainwashing. remind me to see if any crackpots on the internets think holograms are the devil.