The Windows 7 Week Wrap-up

Although this is only the fourth day, it is Friday today so it is the last day of the week. The old 915 bit the dust and got binned, the “new” 915 got a fresh Vista installation on its second 80 GB HDD after all attempts to restore the original installation were unsuccessful. Obviously I should have just ghosted the original image from the start, an easy thing to do here where we ghost PCs all the time. However it is only fair to say that the problems I experienced were completely unpredictable, as hardware failure often is; the old 915 must have corrupted the hard disk so that it couldn’t be made to boot. I breathed a sigh of relief when that new Vista installation came up for the first time on that PC. It has a good XP installation so there won’t be any more issues with it. Four year old PCs with board problems are not worth repairing; the Foxconn TS-001 chassis and its Windows sticker are together worth about $250, and if form factors are still the same, they will come in handy when the time comes next year to rebuild either or both of my secondary work PC or my home PC with new parts as referred in a recent blog.

And now back to Windows 7. This PC running the Release Candidate has rapidly become my main work computer much as I expected. Being both Windows 7 and x64, there are going to be a few hiccups, but these haven’t been especially major. The general experience worldwide is that this RC is so good that many people are running it as a primary PC. I expect the production version will become my primary just as Vista did before it, but I need that secondary for the times when 7 doesn’t stack up, until the first SP comes out. As yet I haven’t done much experimentation with the new features like libraries, or tried any additional hardware on it; the card reader is going to stay on the secondary for now. Integris, which has been pretty patchy at our site on Vista, seems to be OK on this 7 installation for now. I haven’t really noticed any issues with other applications except the printer drivers which seem to take two or three goes to install. There are a couple of other PCs here at site running 7 and I expect I will get some feedback on them, and what will come out eventually and predictably is that we will offer the release 7 version to staff users as an option. Rolling out Vista has been a terrible disappointment. As an OS it is only any good for home PCs, in a domain environment there are massive challenges and only now do I fully understand why people have chosen not to deploy it.

Next week I plan on being back to the more humdrum, or in this case, ISA 2006 and making Outlook Web Access, Outlook RPC over HTTP and Terminal Services Gateway work through it. All three of those services running on the same server make use of SSL, and ISA, which will be brought into production as a firewall on our site at that time, will filter and route all of the SSL traffic to those three applications. Having all of them on SSL reduces the number of ports we have to have open on the firewall down to just two for incoming traffic, a few more for outgoing traffic. All of the rules for these have to be set up in ISA. It is pretty much the final stage of a big year long project with setting up the two servers, the mail/terminal server gateway and the firewall. And I’d hope that in future it would be viable to have Exchange hosted offsite so that when the two oldest servers come up for replacement at the end of next year, we can downsize.

Windows 7 Week, Day 3

Today was the day that I rashly decided to do what I didn’t want to do yesterday. That is, to turn the D915 (old XP box) into a dual boot Vista/XP system, and the Q35 (old Vista box) into Windows 7. All this would be relatively simple, just a matter of moving some HDDs and peripherals around wouldn’t it? Unfortunately a long way short of simple is how it has turned out.

The first problems came with the D915 which refused to boot either 160 GB HDD – Vista or XP – the dreaded “Error loading operating system” message came up. Even trying a fresh XP install onto its 160 GB disk initially seemed to work, until first reboot. Vista diagnostics and EasyBCD could not make the Vista disk boot at all. The only thing that would work, initially, was the original 80 GB boot disk with XP from this machine – until something else phutted and it stopped booting, then the BIOS seems to have had a fit and reset itself to the original settings, or some default mode. At this point I have tried another identical computer, which still couldn’t boot anything except its own 80 GB XP disk, so that is what I’m using, and right now I am ghosting the Vista image to see if it can be made to boot if it is loaded onto an 80 GB disk also, which it will just fit onto. It seems strange these BIOSes would not be able to boot a 160 GB disk, since LBA 48 has been around for quite a few years, and I don’t remember any problems with my D915 at home, which I’m fairly sure with an older BIOS version is running Vista on a 160 GB HDD (Update: Well I was wrong about that, it is booting off the second newer 80 GB HDD). I tried putting the Vista HDD back into the Q35 but it still is no go. It looks like something in the BIOS of the D915 has scrambled part of the disk. Funny thing is the D915 recognised a 160 GB HDD and a 500 GB HDD in the same machine… just didn’t want to boot a 160.

So far the only thing that has worked as planned is moving 7 from the temporary box into my Q35, completely problem free, as expected due to identical hardware. Let’s hope that ghosting the Vista image onto a smaller disk works, if not I could still try ImageX on this disk from XP and then restore everything except the boot files which get installed with a fresh Vista install, now this is getting a bit desperate LOL). The big disappointment of the day is that Intel has absolutely nothing on its website referring to this disk limitation on these boards. The ATA-6 standard that introduced 48 bit LBA first came out in 2001 and has been supported by Windows since then, and as the D915 chipset boards are able to recognise drives greater than 128 GiB when they are not boot disks (I’ve used a 500 GB tertiary disk in one of these machines for a couple of years with full access to all its capacity) it is not a very helpful situation when a major motherboard manufacturer has got this kind of limitation in some of its boards and yet has absolutely no documentation of this situation.

Windows 7 Week, Day 2

Today was relatively ho-hum, the main excitement has been turning the Vista box into dual boot XP/Vista and taking some bits out of the old XP box to put into the temporary 7 box. But that four year old Intel 915 system won’t get the boot just yet. When 7 becomes real next year, the Vista box will become the 7 box (just swap over the HDDs) and then the HDD from the Vista box goes into the old XP box. At that point XP may have to be reinstalled if there are HAL problems, and surely Vista will have to be reactivated, but this is going to be the quickest and most pain free way of getting everything set up again. (Why don’t I do that now? Um, err… it hadn’t occurred to me) – actually I’m not quite ready to make the big box the 7 system with all the stuff in it like the Lightscribe DVD writer and card reader, I still need those to be able to run in Vista or XP in case there are problems in 7. Instead I spent a lot of time squeezing a 500 GB HDD into the 7’s low profile case and setting up the Vista box to dual boot XP. Which itself was surely fun as well…and also an opportunity to discover neither of these systems ever had a floppy drive in them – Intel got all carried away with minimalism on some of the Q35 chipset boards and dropped the FDD connector, as well as the PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. Well guess which three connectors have re-emerged in the desktop line (and the parallel IDE connector still exists as well)

Anyway, workwise, things have settled down a bit with 7, except for compatible printer drivers (Brother). Some work and some don’t. New ones are coming soon. The lack of a driver that would work on the colour printer led me to fire up the Vista box of sheer necessity in order to print some pictures, and to use its card reader to download them from the camera. That’s why I am setting it up to dual boot with XP, because XP may still be needed in some form, and in the meantime I want three OSs to be on only two PCs, which is quite reasonable. The day is concluding with SP2 going onto the Vista system.