*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Right before lunch I decided to give generating a Vista key one more try and sure enough I finally got it to generate.  I finished up some code I was working on and then went to lunch to grab a sandwich real quick hoping I could get through most of the install during lunch.

For those curious, I am installing Vista on my AMD 64 machine.  The only difference from what is listed on my other blog is I have 2GBs of memory now instead of 1GB.  After hunting around for a few minutes I found the Promise Fasttrak 378 driver I was going to need and I rebooted the machine with the DVD I burnt in the drive. 

After several minutes I was greeted with an installation screen.  I entered my key and pressed next.  And then BOOOOOM!  The installation blew up.  I was told my installation was canceled and the error was 0x80070000D.  The text read: 

Windows cannot open the required file D:\Sources\Install.wim.  Make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the installation.  Error code:  0x8007000D.

I pressed ok (since that is all I could press) and went back to the main screen and chose the repair option hoping it would get me a little further along.  I was able to see my devices:  floppy disk, DVD drive, and even my external FireWire drive.  I explored the DVD drive and I could see the install.wim file on the disk.  WTF!?

Thinking I may have had a bad download I went back to MSDN and checked the Sha1 hash key.  After a few minutes my Sha1 generator came back with the same key.  That removes that theory,  our files are an exact copy.

I did some more digging on the Internet and found that other people had the same problem.  Mostly with Virtual Machine installations (which is all I had done with Vista myself up until this point).  Someone stated they thought the DVD player was the problem, someone else said they did a re-burn and it solved the problem.  Since I had validated I had a good copy I decided to reburn another DVD with another program.  This time I used Alcohol 120% instead of Nero.  Unfortunately I had the exact same problem and lunch is now over.  Stay tuned while the saga unfolds.

Windows Vista posted to MSDN downloads yesterday so I started the download overnight.  When I came into the office this morning I found the Windows Vista x64 3.7GB DVD download had finished.   Since I had been backing things up on my machine the past several days I was ready to install. 

Unfortunately I was stopped cold in my tracks, along with a lot of other MSDN developers because the key generator is broke on MSDN.  For those that don't know how MSDN works with subscriptions it works like this.  A subscriber can download for the most part anything Microsoft publishes, operating systems, beta releases, Office products, server products (biztalk, sharepoint, etc).  In order to install the product you have to generate a key.  The product key that is generated is your private key.  In most cases you can utilize this key up to 10 times to install the product on various machines.   This all sounds great but right now the key generator that generates the keys is broke. 

I started chatting with an online person and they said it was a known problem.  They gave me the toll free number to MSDN support which is 800.759.5474. I called the number and the lady said it was in fact down, they are working on it, try back later today.  Currently no ETA on when it will be resolved.

For those that have MSDN accounts Microsoft has posted the Vista download a tad bit early.  Both the 32bit and 64bit versions are available.  The Beta and RC releases are officially gone.  The new era of Vista is officially rung in, Merry Christmas.  Sign in and get your download on (but do so after I finish mine :) ).  Currently I am downloading at a measly 17KB / sec.