One of my machines at home runs Windows Vista Ultimate.  Until last night, it had an Asus Striker Extreme motherboard in it, a Core 2 Duo 6400 CPU, 2 GB of RAM, an Nvidia 8800 GTS video card, a PCI IDE card with four hard drives attached, a DVD/CD burner, USB mouse, PS/2 keyboard, dual 19” monitors, and 3 SATA hard drives.  In total it has over a terabyte of disk space.

I chose Vista both for the experience it would provide for work as well as the fact that when you have over about 700 GB of IDE/SATA disk space, Windows XP SP2 starts to exhibit data corruption problems due to some kind of static internal area where disk cache data is stored (I lost a ton of files before digging up an obscure KB article on that).  I spent hours trying to fix that issue and couldn’t.  The only solution was a hotfix from Microsoft, which they would not give me because I was using an OEM copy of Windows XP Pro.  They wanted me to go back to where I bought the OEM license, which was Newegg.com, which doesn’t offer tech support like that.  So I was stuck.  When I went to Vista, I went with a retail license in case it had the same problem.

Fortunately, it didn’t.

Unfortunately for me, over a year later, that Asus motherboard decided to give up the ghost.  It apparently killed a DIMM, which I replaced.  Then it pretty much just died entirely, randomly rebooting and crashing even when just sitting at a BIOS screen.  I decided it was time for a (less-expensive) replacement.  I bought an MSI P35 Platinum and 2GB of matching RAM.  Everything else from the old setup would work with this.

Last night, I received the new parts.  I removed the old motherboard and RAM, installed the new ones, connected everything back up, and fired up the system.  It came to life, then immediately choked with a “BOOTLDR is missing” error.  A bit of troubleshooting revealed what I was afraid of… In the install, Vista decided to put the bootloader on one disk, and the rest of Vista on another.  If you reassemble things such that the bootloader disk is in a different location, the machine won’t boot.  I booted from the Vista disc and did a repair.  I rebooted again and got the same error.  Another repair later, the system came up and landed at the login screen.  I logged in and found I had no mouse.

Apparently, the new motherboard uses a slightly newer variety of USB2 ports than the old one did, so there were no drivers on the machine or in Vista itself.  I popped in the manufacturer’s CD to load the drivers.  Guess what?  The installer was designed to be clicked on, and there were no keyboard shortcuts available!  With no USB ports, I had no mouse… and I had no PS/2 mice in the house to substitute.

Undaunted, I walked through creating a “Remote Assistance” file and launched it on another PC.  I was able to remote control the mouse using the other PC.  That allowed me to launch the chipset driver installer on the manufacturer’s CD.  Unfortunately, about ¾ of the way through the install, the installer crapped out with an “unknown error” and quit. 

Interestingly, Vista chimed in and said Microsoft had a solution for this problem in the form of a Hotfix.  After fighting my way through web browsing using only the keyboard, I was able to download and install this hotfix.  Sadly, it didn’t “hotfix” anything. I still couldn’t get the installer to work and couldn’t get drivers to load for the USB2 ports.

At this point, I decided it was time to wipe and reload Vista from scratch.  I booted the machine from the Vista CD and started up the installer.  It asked for my license key, which I entered.  Then it told me that it couldn’t install from this license key unless I started the installer from within the copy of Windows Vista running with that particular key.  (More antipiracy technology, I guess.)  Fine.  I rebooted from the hard drive and keyboarded my way to the installer.  It got around 60% of the way through, gave an “unknown error” and died. (Don’t you just love “unknown” errors?)

Interestingly, aside from the lack of any USB connectivity, the system is more stable and responsive than it’s ever been.  I guess that old motherboard was in worse shape than I knew.  Unfortunately, nothing I’ve done has brought USB to life.  I’ve tried deleting the ports in the Device Manager and re-detecting.  I’ve tried walking through the driver installer(s) within the Device Manager.  I’ve tried downloading a newer version of the drivers from Intel for the chipset (another Microsoft solution Vista offered me).  Nothing so far has worked.  By about 2am, I had had enough.  I went to bed.

What I *think* I am going to be able to do to resolve the problem is this…

First, I’ll disconnect the PCI IDE card so that none of the IDE drives can be seen.  I’ll disconnect all the SATA drives and hook up a brand new one I have sitting around, one that has no OS on it.  The only drives the Vista installer will be able to see will be the one SATA drive and the DVD-ROM it’s booting from.  I should then be able to install it fresh on that drive, and not have bootloaders sitting around on any other disk.

Of course, when I say “install it fresh” what I really mean (thanks to other Vista anti-piracy code) is that I’ll install it once without giving it my serial number, then install it over top of that, giving it my serial number so that (as an “upgrade” version) it will be a “clean” Vista install.  Hopefully at that point I can resolve the USB issue, reattach the PCI IDE card, reattach the other SATA hard drives, and maybe, if the stars all align correctly, be granted permission by Microsoft to activate it using the existing serial number.  (But given the number of hardware changes I expect they will not be nice about it.)

Unfortunately, going back to XP Pro isn’t really an option unless I go buy a retail copy somewhere so that they’ll give me the fix for the IDE problem.

Going to Linux would be an option, but wouldn’t allow me to use the system for my main purposes, video editing, DVD work, and of course gaming…

Sadly, my actual “use” experiences with Vista have been generally positive.  My “install” experiences have decidedly not been.

And for the Mac fans out there, no, OS X isn't the answer.  For one thing, I refuse to spend the kind of money Apple is charging for a Mac Pro - and I wouldn't be happy with anything less than that amount of horsepower.  I also find OS X, especially OS X Leopard, at least as frustrating to troubleshoot as Vista has been.  I'm also too addicted to Windows gaming to ever be happy with the state of gaming on the Mac.