Journey to Vista: Part I of ?

Aside from working for 9.5 hours, all I did on my birthday was... hmm. Install Windows Vista!

My 120-day trial of XP was running out... days counting down to 0 more quickly than I could keep track of. And so, last week, I ordered Vista (Home Premium version, but who's counting). Well, it came today. I was going to give a little presentation at work about building computers (remind me to think about who my audience is next time I do that) and so I had my mom run by and drop off the package, but it was too late for me to install it first to show it to the people. Unfortuate. Or so I thought at the time.

Then I left work. The family (minus dad, who is in Europe this week on some kind of fancy business trip) was going to go to Steak and Shake or something, but it was already closed. Go figure... at 8:45 PM on a Monday. Oh well. So after that little detour, I returned home to try to get Vista to work.

I backed up my files to one of my other hard drives. Or, well, technically, to a small piece of all three of my hard drives in this computer. But anyway... that's roughly $250 of game CD keys, music from iTunes, and things of that nature. But the money aside, I did not really want to have to mess with setting everything up again. I copy all my game install CDs to the hard drive - much faster to install them that way. At any rate, I ran the Vista installer from within my current version of Windows. It got kinda far along, and then it asked to restart. So I comply.

BOOM! Blue screen of death!
(restart again...)
BOOM! Blue screen of death!
(mess around with the motherboard settings for a bit)
BOOM! Blue screen of death!

Ahh... a glimmer of hope? Vista didn't die when my computer restarted at this moment. Yeah, I'm writing this as it tries to install Vista again. But anyway, back to my story.

At this point, I had given up on that installation. So I tried to somehow get back at the old files to make sure they were still intact. That wasn't working. Ohh, back to realtime: here loads Vista. Ok, I'd better cut to the chase...

So after much tinkering with components, I "borrowed" the hard drive from my previous computer and booted Windows off of there. I was able to salvage all of my data. Then I tried many more things to get Vista to work, with little success. On a hunch, I eventually got back on and set up the hard drives more simply (converted them to basic partitions, did away with the software RAID) and isolated all my important stuff onto one hard drive, leaving the other 2 completely blank. So then I installed Vista again, and it seems to be working this time. And that's where this story ends for now.

And here's my desk, after all of this:


To be continued...