John M. Brown

I went back and install Vista on my laptop to take back to GLUG a week from tomorrow… and I had more problems.

In short, Windows Vista does NOT like LINUX … at all.

I had installed Debian in an attempt to create a dual boot on the laptop with Debian (it worked quite well with XP) but as you may recall from my earlier post, I was unable to get a successful dual-boot… GRUB couldn’t hand off control to the NT loader.

Okay, no prob, I’ll just reinstall Vista and put Linux back on it after the next meeting… easy, right? well, I thought so too.

I had left all partitions in tact. I made NO CHANGES since Vista was installed the first time. When I installed Debian Linux I used the partitions that I left prior to the first Vista install. Problem is that this time as I went to install Vista on the “C:” drive that it was installed on previously it just crapped out with a Windows Error… so I re-entered the setup and tried again. Same error.

I tried this 3 or 4 times hoping that it was just a fluke… but it wasn’t. I then DELETED and RECREATED the “C:” partition thinking it was just a problem with the existing windows install. Still no luck, same error.

It wasn’t until I completely ERASED the two Linux partitions (the “/” and swap partitions) that Vista would go back on. How lame is that, it worked the first time and now it won’t? same CD, same version of the OS, and same partition table.

Microsoft, consider this a warning. Fix your installer or suffer the wrath of a very perturbed Linux user.