OK, so I managed to take my broken Vista DVD and make a bootable version from it. How, you may ask? With CDIMAGE GUI and some info from the Internets.
CDIMAGE works like mkisofs (the Linux utility), but this GUI utility has, well, a GUI. So it's better. Maybe :).
Anyway, I copied the contents of the DVD to a folder on my hard drive and then ran CDIMAGE GUI. The link has a nice little walkthrough. All I needed to worry about was the boot sector file (\boot\etfsboot.com), the volume name (which I made something like "VistaBizUpgd") and where to save it. Then I tested it in Virtual PC just to make sure. Voila! Works like a charm.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Trying to get to Vista
So, after a bit of thought, I decided to move to Vista on my home machine, rather than Linux (specifically Ubuntu). I do want to become better at Linux (having only installed and used it for short periods), but I think that professionally that Vista will become more of an imperative soon. Sad that no one really likes this OS, but that it will get adapted anyway because Microsoft will force businesses to migrate from XP.
Anyway, so I backed up my machine with the excellent DriveImage XML (excellent because it works and is free) using a BartPE boot disk and an external USB hard drive. I then tried to install Vista using a Business Edition Upgrade DVD. However, the DVD wouldn't boot. I tried to boot using a CD and then switch to the DVD - but that wouldn't work, either. It appears that the ISO image from which I had gotten my Vista DVD wasn't bootable. I will have to have a talk with the guy who imaged the original disk. I suspect that it was imaged with ISObuster, and wasn't imaged with the correct option.
(As an aside, the correct option is "extract CD Image, Raw2User *.tao", then rename the file to have a .iso extension - see this page.)
In the midst of this I had wiped the hard drive (because I wanted to do a clean install of Vista, not an upgrade), so I restored the DriveImage XML image so I could sort out the Vista DVD boot issue. The image came back successfully, but then the computer wouldn't boot. I tried running a Windows XP CD and going into the Recovery Console and running the commands FIXMBR and FIXBOOT, but no go. I booted back into BartPE and examined the boot.ini - it looked fine. I booted into a basic boot floppy disk whose image is on my boot CD so that I could run Ranish Partition manager to examine the partition table and confirmed that the image that I wanted to boot from was active and the first partition.
Finally, a Google search led me to a page where someone described having to change their BIOS settings to get the computer to boot from their hard drive. So I went into the BIOS, and changed the hard drive from Auto to LBA. Viola! It worked!
What a mess! Always, when I go through something like this, I wonder how people manage who don't have the technical skill to do this stuff, or even two computers to do a search on one while the other is down. I find it tough enough, and this is my job!
Anyway, so I backed up my machine with the excellent DriveImage XML (excellent because it works and is free) using a BartPE boot disk and an external USB hard drive. I then tried to install Vista using a Business Edition Upgrade DVD. However, the DVD wouldn't boot. I tried to boot using a CD and then switch to the DVD - but that wouldn't work, either. It appears that the ISO image from which I had gotten my Vista DVD wasn't bootable. I will have to have a talk with the guy who imaged the original disk. I suspect that it was imaged with ISObuster, and wasn't imaged with the correct option.
(As an aside, the correct option is "extract CD Image, Raw2User *.tao", then rename the file to have a .iso extension - see this page.)
In the midst of this I had wiped the hard drive (because I wanted to do a clean install of Vista, not an upgrade), so I restored the DriveImage XML image so I could sort out the Vista DVD boot issue. The image came back successfully, but then the computer wouldn't boot. I tried running a Windows XP CD and going into the Recovery Console and running the commands FIXMBR and FIXBOOT, but no go. I booted back into BartPE and examined the boot.ini - it looked fine. I booted into a basic boot floppy disk whose image is on my boot CD so that I could run Ranish Partition manager to examine the partition table and confirmed that the image that I wanted to boot from was active and the first partition.
Finally, a Google search led me to a page where someone described having to change their BIOS settings to get the computer to boot from their hard drive. So I went into the BIOS, and changed the hard drive from Auto to LBA. Viola! It worked!
What a mess! Always, when I go through something like this, I wonder how people manage who don't have the technical skill to do this stuff, or even two computers to do a search on one while the other is down. I find it tough enough, and this is my job!
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