Greetings all, with some luck, perhaps I can save some pain for anyone who plans on doing a reinstall anytime in the near (or distant) future.
First, some background. Early this year I built myself a new pc. Like any good geek, I did a bunch of overclocking, tweaking, and putting it through its paces, including tweaks and toys that in the end just cause more problems than they are worth. Well eventually I broke it. Specifically, no matter what I do, I have not been able to install Vista SP1 either via Windows Update, or as a separate download and install. I read about 17, 042 knowledge base articles on the subject and about 42,720 MS forum posts on the subject and they all pretty much said the same thing, a real old restore (50% success rate) or reinstall.
Well I for one have a habit of a fresh reinstall for a new system at the six month time and we are close enough so I figured why not just do the reinstall now? Seeing as I have the tweaks and toys I want and have all my timings set for my overclocking, it’s as good a time as any to do this. So I copy my RAID drivers onto my USB stick, stick in my Vista Ultimate 64-bit DVD into the drive and reboot.
So the DVD starts up, copy’s the initial files, asks for the code for the DVD then it happens. “Windows is missing the cdrom/dvd drivers. Please specify the location….blah blah blah.”
I hope you never have to do a search during an install. In their infinite wisdom, the folks out at MSHQ decided that it is best not to give you any search functionality during an install. They also decided that you should not be able to see any of the actual file names either. In fact, they figured that it is best if they only let you see the folder name. And not let you also search the subfolders. Only one folder at a time, and it will let you know if there is anything worthwhile checking out.
If it finds nothing, it figures you want to go back to the root and not pick up from where you were. If it finds 1,800 drivers, it will list every single one of them for you. Much joy was not had.
Play ball with the dogs. Drink half a bottle of Bacardi 8. Look at claw hammer and consider using it as a new programming language. Have a moment of brilliant insight. Return to my nemesis.
Take out install DVD and reboot. We are pleased to see that the original Vista installation has not been changed yet so we load it back up. Start button…Search…cdrom. Up comes our cdrom.ini, cdrom.inf, cdrom.sys, cdrom.xxx, all in all about a dozen or so files. Copy all of them to the USB stick that has my RAID drivers on them so they are all in one place.
Put Vista Ultimate-Let-Us-Show-You-How-Much-We-Hate-You 64-bit DVD into the drive and reboot. Exact same thing happens as stated above, only this time I get to have it search the USB stick, and there is finds the cdrom/dvd drivers and the RAID drivers. The load up without any problems and the install goes smoothly from there. Tonight when I get home I’ll get to finish getting all the Windows Updates, get all my updated drivers installed, and then set myself a nice new ‘clean’ restore point.
Here is the weird issue with the dvd drive. It seems to be that there can be issues with SATA cdrom/dvd drives during the installation. I found in my forum crawling that there have been issues with SATA optical drives but not IDE optical drives, so do yourself a favor and be prepared, keep the drivers in an easy to find place such as a USB stick or Floppy disk, lest you find yourself in a quivering ball, sobbing in the corner.
