Installing Vista: From Hell to Heaven
I am pleased to announce that I am typing this on a freshly installed Vista64 installation, on the same exact machine that I had so much trouble with recently!
A genius Tester in Windows contacted me with a theory and a possible work-around, and he was right: something about the AHCI driver is unhappy on my machine, so his suggestion was to go into the BIOS, go to SATA Operation and change it from RAID Automatic/AHCI to Combo mode. I did this, and Vista installed in less than 30 minutes! Fabulous. It was a bit freaky to see the percentage for "Expanding files" change every few seconds, instead of every 15 minutes in all my previous attempts. The downside is that my XP installation that I dual-boot to will blue-screen with the BIOS set this way (for the reasons outlined in an earlier posting), so when I switch OSes I have to also switch SATA modes.
I'd like to link to some Dell documentation on this particular BIOS setting, but I can't find any.
The default install covered all my hardware except audio: I found an XP64 driver and tried installing that, but it complained that I was using the wrong operating system. However after that Windows said "You want me to try that again with some compatibility settings", so I said Yes, and it worked! I have a working audio driver now. My Performance score is 3.4, which isn't great, but will suffice for what I need (and for what I paid for this box).
Next I have to start installing the most commonly used stuff and trying to see what I can and can't do in this brave new Vista world. It would be nice to get XP to boot in Combo mode, and it would also be nice to delete the ten or so dead entries in the Vista boot loader left over from my installation attempts, but that's just gravy.
Comments
Anonymous
June 29, 2007
The comment has been removedAnonymous
July 08, 2007
RAID Automatic/AHCI is not a new problem, and the only thing u can do is reinstalling XP. Hope to hear how it goes with removing the "dead" entries...Anonymous
July 10, 2007
You can always run the XP install in a VM, however if you have both the installs on the same HD converting it to a virtual HD wouldn't work...Anonymous
August 03, 2007
Following the travails of my Vista install at home (and subsequent success ), I will be listing my successAnonymous
September 17, 2007
The comment has been removedAnonymous
September 25, 2007
I had the same problem with dell only then to load the xp cdrom even xp is installed i founded a few weeks ago on the chinees forum of dell the solution with pictures. I will try to look on my work for the link for you :)Anonymous
September 25, 2007
If you think the general consumer will be able to figure this out (or be contacted by your own company's QA), then you're sadly mistaken ;-)Anonymous
September 25, 2007
The comment has been removedAnonymous
February 15, 2009
Here is the above workaround page translated. Probably old news but maybe someone out there is still struggling: http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsupport1.ap.dell.com%2Fcn%2Fzh%2Fforum%2Fthread.asp%3Ffid%3D3%26tid%3D72261&sl=zh-CN&tl=en