First Vista Install - Any Advice ?

Flight · 15 May 2008 at 18:43

Installing Vista Home Premium 64 bit, SP1 edition, for the first time this evening.

Any tips or anything to be aware of ? I remember reading something about it not liking 4 Gig RAM when you first install it, though I'm not sure what version that is on.

Going to install it on a PC I've been using for a while, with two physical drives. presume I just throw the OS disk in the DVD drive and overwrite the primary HD that has had the OS on. Is it worth formatting the second HD also, which is full of stuff I've installed under XP ?

Bomag · 15 May 2008 at 19:12

Make sure you have backed up you date and disconnect all the other HDD as Vista may want to place the boot loader on a different HDD

Flight · 15 May 2008 at 19:21

Bomag said:
Make sure you have backed up you date and disconnect all the other HDD as it Vista want to place the boot loader on a different HDD

Thanks mate; VERY much appreciated. Was just about to start and didn't know anything about that at all.

Going to put a 1Tb Spinpoint F1 in afterwards as well.

marc2003 · 15 May 2008 at 19:25

4gb of ram won't be a problem with an sp1 copy.

Flight · 15 May 2008 at 19:33

Thanks marc

Snakedoctor · 15 May 2008 at 19:47

Bomag said:
Make sure you have backed up you date and disconnect all the other HDD as it Vista want to place the boot loader on a different HDD

Erm, what? You mean "Boot manager", not "boot loader", thats for pirates!

The boot manager is placed on the Boot drive, no need to disconnect any other drives, sp1 should be fine with 4gb ram at install, as is non sp1 as well anyway.

It is quite different to Xp in the way it behaves at times, you will need to get used to the quirks, such as Superfetch and Indexing. I strongly recommend that you do not disable system restore. It can be a huge time and effort saver.

Bomag · 15 May 2008 at 22:28

Turophobic said:
Erm, what? You mean "Boot manager", not "boot loader", thats for pirates!

The boot manager is placed on the Boot drive, no need to disconnect any other drives, sp1 should be fine with 4gb ram at install, as is non sp1 as well anyway.

A clean install from DVD will assume the boot drive is HDD0 even if you have the Bios set to boot from another drive. I don't care what Vista calls its boot menu system but if vista writes it to the wrong disk it's going to be a bit of a problem starting it.

Snakedoctor · 15 May 2008 at 23:57

Bomag said:
A clean install from DVD will assume the boot drive is HDD0 even if you have the Bios set to boot from another drive. I don't care what Vista calls its boot menu system but if vista writes it to the wrong disk it's going to be a bit of a problem starting it.

You can select which drive to install to at the start of the install.

Flight · 16 May 2008 at 00:04

Thanks for the advice folks; it installed smoothly.

Burnsy2023 · 16 May 2008 at 00:50

Turophobic said:
Erm, what? You mean "Boot manager", not "boot loader", thats for pirates!

The terms are totally interchangeable. Pirates use a modified boot loader to bypass certain features, but it doesn't mean it's all bad.

Burnsy

Bomag · 16 May 2008 at 01:08

Turophobic said:
You can select which drive to install to at the start of the install.

You can select the drive to install the files but I have not seen anywhere where you can chose the location where Vista puts the boot files.

If you have a IDE disk, a large data disk on SATA 1 and your new disk you want to put Vista on SATA 2. Windows will assume either the IDE disk is the boot drive or possibly SATA 1. If you select SATA 2 to boot your new copy of Vista then it should give you an error message.