Yesterday I registered for and downloaded Windows Vista Beta 2.

The download reported it would take ten hours, so I started it and went to bed. This morning the download was done, in much less than ten hours. I popped a DVD-R in the burner and let it go. Today after work I set to try and install it to the old Pentium 4. The machine has two hard drives, and I'd decided to dump the SuSE that was on there. I made a quick pass through and copied the data I wanted to keep to another server. After that copying was done, I inserted the DVD and reset tbe PC.

The machine restarted fine, but skipped booting from the optical drive. I checked the BIOS to ensure it was correctly configured. It was, but still wouldn't boot from the disk. I thought maybe the disk burn failed; I hadn't checked the results before I closed the burning software. I put the disk back in the LINUX machine, and the disk auto-mounted just fine. It mounted as ISO-19660, with just one file. A little command-line rework and I mounted the disk UDF and all was there. I thought maybe the P4 machine had a problem reading the DVD-R disk, so I burned a DVD+R disk. Still no go.

I started to scratch my head a little. The P4 wouldn't boot from the disk, nor could the machine read either disk in either Windows or LINUX. The AMD64 worked with both disks. Even the Mac could read them.

Not to be beaten by a couple of disks I thought to copy the files to the Windows drive on the P4 and just install from there. The hard bit there is to copy files from LINUX to Windows. SSH came to the rescue. A quickie download and I installed WinSCP to get the job done. An hour later and Vista's install files were ready to be used.

I fired up the install, and all went well. The install from within Windows won't partition drives, so I had to use the XP Device Manager to delete the LINUX partitions and create the required NTFS partition. I did this all without leaving the install, which was cool.

The install copied for a while, rebooted a few times, and appeared to run just fine. The mobo sound and network evidently doesn't have drivers yet, so I rebooted to XP so I can investigate the devices and download workable drivers.

I'll get back to it soon enough.