To recap the story:
I Downloaded Windows Vista Beta 2 at work on Friday. Burned a copy to DVD (you have to use DVD) but it was a bad copy.
Re-downloaded it on Saturday and burned a nice shiny new DVD (burned at 4x – recommended to burn at 2x – talk about slow). I Ran first crack at installing it late Saturday night – found I had to un-install a few programs first (McAfee Security Center and Anti-Virus; Windows Defender; Real Player) so I went to bed.
Sunday, I uninstalled the requested software and tried to install. Tried to install again, and again, and again. Four tries, no success – each time the install rolled back nicely to Windows XP Pro SP2 without any problem – but not the result I wanted.
Monday – Oilers vs Carolina hockey game starts. I Browsed MS blogs while the Oilers lose the game.
Found a possible solution – copy the entire contents of the Windows Vista DVD to hard disk and install from there. Did the copy; ran the install; SUCCESS! I’m running on Windows Vista Ultimate (Beta 2) right now. Took about 2.5 hours to install on my system.
The install process gives you a clean install with a Windows.old folder with the complete contents of your old installation. No files or settings or software is copied over for you. If you want the old stuff – copy it back. Software needs to be re-installed. I’m now in the process of getting myself back up to snuff.
Software/drivers automatically installed:
HP printer/scanner driver – haven’t tried it yet
Software downloaded and installed so far:
Flash Player
NVIDIA GeForce drivers (video card) – still might be some quirks with this
Firefox
Win2PDF
iTunes + Quicktime
Next up:
Microsoft Office System 2007 Beta 2
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
QuickBooks
TSW WebCoder
Ulead PhotoImpact
Google’s Picasa
Corel Print House 4 (I don’t have high hopes for this as it was written for Win 98)
HP Camera drivers
iPod drivers
VPN driver
Probably take me a few days to get everything up and running. I’ll try to keep you posted.
Brian's Interesting Stuff 