Vista Installer team I don't like you much at the moment.....
I like Vista. I was running the beta as soon as it would install on my machine and I've suffered through the quirks of missing drivers and defending the OS while being called a Microsoft shill by some. But I'm waisting time now because when the installer has an error its restarting instead of letting me go back and change options.
Since I thought I may do several installs and since I don't have a spare SATA cable I put the Vista files onto a nice fast 4Kb USB key and booted from that - all seems quite straightforward and it is supposed to be much faster.
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Let it boot into the installer... wait
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Enter the language settings
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Click the 'install now' button... wait
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Type in the product key... wait
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Accept the license agreement
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Click 'Custom' since this is a new installation.
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The 'drive chooser' window shows up. I have 2 brand new drives and it lets me choose between them. I pick my fast expensive 10k raptor and hit Next and windows says 'Windows could not determine if this computer contains a valid system volume'. Press OK and the installer goes back to step 2... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhhh. Whats wrong with just sending me back to step 6 so I can fix the problem with the drive.
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After trying a couple of times I assume that the drive need to be partitioned and formatted. There's no way to do that so I press the 'advanced' buttons and get several new buttons but still nothing about partitioning. There is a 'New' button with an icon that looks like a star (yes great icon guys) so I click that and sure enough it makes a new partition...
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Select the new partition and Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargggggggggggggg - I get the same damn error and back to step 2
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Do some searches on the web. Hmmm
this is old but I seem to remember playing with the boot priority and moving the USB drive to the top of the list.... so restart, fix the bios and go back to #1
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Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
So on reflection maybe the real problem here is that the error message just isn't very helpful. The list of drives I'm presented with doesn't include the USB key I booted from so I have no idea that its a problem due to that.
Or maybe the real problem here is that I shouldn't go fiddling with BIOS settings :-)