*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Sorry for the delay in this thread of posts about installing Windows Vista but I ran into a very nasty virus that kept me away from the computer for several days.  In Part 2 the last problem I had encountered was the installation not being able to find the install.wim file.  After checking and re-checking my hash, I knew for a fact I had a good download so it had to be the burn of the DVD that was causing my problems.

After searching the Internet I found others that had the same problem.  Most were trying to install Vista in Virtual PC or VMWare though (not on a regular PC).  More times than not it was always the burned DVD.  Some of the users suggested to burn the DVD at the lowest possible burn speed.  So I fired up another version of Nero and chose the lowest option available, the 2x option.

New Error During Installation

Immediately upon booting with the new 2x DVD I burned, the computer read the DVD drive faster, booted faster and things appeared to be in order.  Once it got to the license screen I typed in the license key and didn’t get the d:\sources\install.wim error I had previously gotten.  I thought I was on my way to an install…… WRONG!  After I chose my Promise Fasttrak driver from my USB jump drive I chose my C: as the partition to install Vista too and formatted the partition.  After about a minute of the installation copying files, I got this screen.

Ok, so here is the WORST part of this.  In order to get to this point, I had formatted my main C:\ drive.  Yep.  Blown away.  This meant I couldn’t reboot back into Windows XP and burn another copy or anything.  This is one of those cases where having multiple PCs comes in handy.  My only other computer that had a DVD burner was my Dell Laptop but I didn’t have the ISO on this laptop but I did backup the ISO to my external drive.  I will spare you the hours it took me to get the ISO copied over to the laptop which didn’t have a FireWire port.  Moving on.

Once I got the ISO copied onto the laptop, I checked the hash.  Yep, it was good.  I had to go to town anyway so I decided to pickup some new DVD discs.  Further investigation on forums stated this could also be a problem.  Once I returned from the store I put the new disc in the drive of the laptop ready to burn yet another DVD.  Then another problem appeared.  For some reason Alcohol 120% wouldn’t burn the disc, it wouldn’t even start the burn.  Thinking that Alcohol 120% was just on the fritz I downloaded CDBurnerXP, a well known and respected free burning program.  Same problem.  What was going on? 

Upgrade DVD Firmware

Reading the error logs from the two programs it seemed the best thing to do was to upgrade the firmware on the DVD drive in the laptop.  It was suppose to “magically” solve the problem.  I upgraded the Sony DVD RW D56A to the latest Sony  firmware of PFS3.

Once I rebooted I thought this was it.  I was going to burn a new DVD at lower speed and get Vista installed.  After I got rebooted I tried to burn the disc again.  It failed to boot.  This time, I got the d:\sources\install.wim error.  By this point, I am starting to suspect the ISO image. 

MSDN…..where did the x64 ISO go?  RTM x64 corrupt?

By this point I am feeling extremely defeated.  Nothing I did worked.  For whatever reason I happened to decide to download the x32 version of Vista and it was about finished.  While I was on MSDN, I noticed that the x64 version of Vista is missing from the site!  It honestly isn’t there anymore.  The 32bit version is but the 64bit version doesn’t show up anymore on the front page or menus.  The only conclusion I can withdraw from all of this having burnt about 15 DVDs at various speeds on various burners and different types of media is the x64 RTM of Vista that was posted to MSDN was corrupt.  Plain and simple, it won’t install. 

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.

I’ve got to catch up on a few blog entries from a few sessions today but I want to take a little extra time to write up a little nicer article on them.  Until then I thought I would throw out a few IE 7 tips that Dave Massey spoke to us about.  Here is the first one up.

I’ve been using IE 7 for a few months and I really like the tab browsing.  But that’s not the only reason users are going to like IE 7.  However, I’m a keyboard hot key nut.  One of the features I like is the tab browsing preview.  Let’s say you have 6 tabs open and you want to go to a certain tab, but you can’t remember which one it is in.  The best way to accomplish this is to use the quick view.  Here’s a screen shot:

(hotkey – CTRL-Q)

Once you hit CTRL-Q you can view all the tabs you have open and then use arrow keys to navigate.  Another useful feature is one Jason mentioned earlier whereby you can type in something like “apple” and then press ctrl-enter and it will add http://www.  and .com to the end giving you http://www.apple.com. 

Dave also turned us onto a quick reference guide on the IE7 blog where they have a quick reference that lists a lot of the hot keys.  Some other ones that are worthy of mentioning are ALT-ENTER which opens a search in a new window.  IE 7 also allows you to add your own search engine into IE 7 really easy.  Go here to look at companies that are already adopting this.  Kinda interesting because if you add this HTML into your page, IE 7 will auto detect your site’s search and allow users to add it to their browser.

<link rel=”search” type=”application/opensearchdescription+xml” title=”Ebay” href=http://yourdomain.com/file.xml />

Here is a sample Ebay xml file from the list of sites:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns=”http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/“>
<ShortName>eBay</ShortName>
<Description>Search Online Auctions</Description>
<Url type=”text/html“ template=”http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?satitle={searchTerms}“ />
</OpenSearchDescription>

For more information about how to use the Open Search definition see this url:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/browser/external/overview/ie7_opensearch_ext.asp