So after the abysmal failure of the Upgrade, I’m now attempting a fresh load in a dedicated partition.

Upon booting the Vista DVD, I select a custom install (the only option available.) Vista is offering a new GUI fdisk utility. I figured I need to go into this utility and clean out the old (now non-accessible) Fedora partitions. This proved trying.

Since the old drive was a dynamic disk the installer wanted nothing to do with it. After about 30 minutes and several reboots I found it impossible to manage the partitions effectively with this new tool.  With the help of a trusty old Windows 98 DOS boot disk and fdisk I was able to clear the partitions enough to progress farther through the Vista installer.

After the initial copy of files to the hard drive the system rebooted and resumed the install – this is better progress than last nights upgrade attempt.  Another few minutes of finalizing the install and yet another reboot.  Interestingly aside from the original product key and EULA sign off, the only prompts I encountered during the install were for the disk location, none of the usual Network, time zone, options questions we have all grown accustom to from the many windows past.

Finally, after this second reboot I am asked to select a username and picture.  This is a local user account and can not be administrator, I have to assume that user is already generated as I am not allowed to take that name.

After username you are asked to enter the PC name and it’s background. Then Windows update preferences, followed by time zone.

That about sums up the install, now I’m looking at a very pretty screen and need to figure out where everything is – more on that in future posts. Â