Are Vista upgrade DVDs not bootable?

Like all NZ schools that have joined the MS license agreement, we received a Vista Business Upgrade DVD recently. There's just one little problem: it's not bootable.

Here's a practical illustration of the situation. In the picture above, you see the extraction from IsoBuster showing what is on a bootable DVD ISO image obtained from Christchurch Polytechnic's Elms program. Notice we have selected the "Bootable CD" item on the left to display the BootCatalog.cat and Microsoft Corporation.img files on the right.

In the picture below, we see the same view of the NZ Ministry of Education DVD. It has the ISO and UDF data items, but it lacks the "Bootable CD" item and its files. And, you guessed it, the other DVD boots for installation and this one doesn't.

I have never actually heard before now of any Windows NT operating system that is not placed on a bootable CD or DVD. Even if it is an upgrade version, it's always been possible to start with a clean HDD with nothing on it, boot from the CD/DVD and install.

Modern MicroATX low profile PC

To bring the series about PC designs right up to the present day, here is a modern low profile desktop PC. This is a generic chassis, the Foxconn DH153, which like many chassis has been adapted to "Prescott" specification when Intel decided that a vent directly above the huge CPU cooler was needed. (From comparison with the other photos one can get an idea easily of how massive the heatsink and fan assembly are on these series of Celeron CPUs)

This board (Intel D101GGC) has two PCI slots, PCI Express x1 and x16. The chipset is ATI Radeon Xpress 200, which provides Radeon X300 onboard graphics. This is a better choice than Intel's own video chips because it can run Windows Vista Aero out of the box.

The DH153 is a low profile chassis and this illustrates the cleverness of the low profile backplane which enables the same motherboard to be used in either a full height or low profile case. All that has to be changed is the PCI cards (in some cases just the bracket on each card). There is no need for a separate motherboard design to fit into a low profile chassis as NLX required. Although there will probably never be a generic chassis as clever as the Compaqs seen earlier there are some good elements in this case. The drives are mounted in a removable sub-assembly; just disconnect all the cables and lift it out to add or remove devices. On the other hand, the power supply can't be taken out of this chassis without removing the motherboard, and the lid is almost certainly not strong enough to support

Ident Server on Vista Clients

Some proxy servers (generally non-Windows) require an Ident server running in each PC on the network so that the server can get the name of the user who is requesting Internet access. While there are limitations and security issues with the Ident protocol it is a simple easy to configure option for some applications.

With the advent of Windows Vista we found the old Identd service that we used to use on XP clients cannot install itself any more. I could find nothing suitable from Google, so I wrote a Windows application to perform this function.

I will look at how it could be made available if there is a demand for it. It doesn't install as a service, so it just has to be loaded at startup, and runs in the system tray.