WAIT! Before you clean install Vista on your desktop machine...

After reading the glowing review of Vista by Ben Forta, and talking to a few close friends who have taken the plunge, I figured why not; I'll install Vista Ultimate. It is difficult to resist the newest toy, despite the media hammering that Vista has taken, and the reviews seemed to indicate that perhaps the dust was settling and Vista was not as bad as the Media thought.

I have a 74GB hard drive that I've split 50GB/20GB, so I had the 20GB partition available just for Vista. I needed to be able to return to XP if things didn't work right; and things got a bit rocky for me.

First of all, I learned the hard way that Vista upgrades your user account in the Active Directory, so there's no going back to XP. So if you use AD on a Win2003 Server with your workstation, use a different user account, other than the one you've been using with XP. If you don't, you're XP account will be orphaned. Of course, I learned this the hard way and got hosed. I ended up formatting my XP installation and using the entire 70GB drive for Vista.

Ben and my good friends who gave glowing reviews of Vista and haven't had an ounce of trouble, loaded Vista on notebooks; not desktops. That makes a huge difference if your desktop has multiple drives and/or partitions. Mine has 3 hard drives and 5 partitions. After about five hours, I had Vista and most of my software loaded, a new configuration required a restart. But this time, after many successful restarts, I got an error.

This was an endless cycle. I decided to try to boot off the DVD, and as soon as I returned the DVD to the tray and restarted Vista it booted right back where I had left it. Fascinating to say the least, my copy of Vista won't boot unless the DVD is in the drive.

After a little bit of research, I learned that having multiple hard drives and partitions while loading Vista, causes great confusion with the Boot Manager. Essentially, the last drive it finds becomes the default boot drive - mine was F: It should have been C:. Sure I tried editing the boot mgr in DOS, with the system recovery software on the Vista DVD. Waste of time. The best way to fix this is a clean install, again.

I clean installed for a third time. This time, I had to disconnect all of my hard drives, except the drive that Vista would be loaded on. Once installed, I reconnected my drives, removed the DVD, and Vista restarts like a champ now.

It makes me wonder, with all the beta testers out there testing Vista and all of the hard work Microsoft put into this OS, how something so basic could slip through the cracks. It was a major inconvenience, although it was easy to fix. I lost an entire day identifying the issue, and resolving it.

I had some issues loading Adobe Flex Builder 2.0.1 which I will comment on in another entry. And make sure you use Java SE 6 with Vista for your JDK and JRE.