Vista Evaluation Blog

Page 2: Install
Page 3: IE7 and SSL
Page 4: Standard User

A tale of obstinacy's triumph over stupidity (mine, mostly), or "a weekend well wasted (20 Oct 2006)"

Skip all this stuff and see how to install Vista RC1 without a DVD drive

(According to Jim Rapoza's eWeek article, this isn't a blog. It's just a log. On the Web.)

the download

Yesterday, I took it into my head to try the new Windows Vista Beta that everyone's talking about, mostly with a view to seeing whether it still sets up users with a password-free administrative account as the default (no, it doesn't. More later). BTW, the RC1 download is available here

So, after a little bit of searching, I find where to download it from. OK, so it wants a Windows account to sign in first. Ha, I have an MSN account that probably still works. Tap-tap-tap. Invalid credentials. Try again. Still invalid. Maybe the password I have recorded in my crypto file is wrong, or maybe the account has expired. Click "forgot your password". Follow the URL in the email to change the password to what I think it is. "That is the same password". Oh, OK. Try it again in the Vista site. This time, it works.

Now, it seems, they want to confirm my email address (fair enough; the Vista page has no idea that I've just done that on the MSN page). Click. Check email. Again. Again. Nothing. Check procmail log to see what happened to it. Aha, it's gone in the spam folder. With a SpamAssassin score of 9.3. That's rather high for legitimate mail; I've never seen one that high before. Above 10 we might have discarded it entirely. Mail Microsoft to tell them. (Get a confirmation mail back, with a score of 5 that goes in the spam box too. Guess I should whitelist Microsoft relays or figure out their mail signature stuff).

Enter the confirm URL, and we're good to go. Click. OK, so it's downloading a DVD ISO image that's going to take a couple of hours over cable modem at home, in Firefox. I wonder if I could get it quicker at TRIUMF and mount it loopback to start seeing what's there. Paste the URL into wget, as I do for Sourceforge when I want it on a different machine than the one at my feet. Hmm, suspiciously fast. Clearly it's not retrieved anything reasonable. Hmm, wonder if Microsoft is filtering out wget. Spoof agent - same. Try starting wget at home. It works. Oho, I guess they have locked the download to the ip address where I am running the Web browser. Complain about that, too. But hey, I can do something else for a couple of hours, and after all, that is the machine with the DVD drive and I wanted to put Vista on another PC in the same room anyway. Leave the local wget as it's more reliable, kill the Firefox download (not that a browser download has ever died on me, but if I hit a bad page doing something else while waiting, the browser might die taking the downloader thread with it).

the ISO

Finally, an ISO image. It's huge (well, 2.6Gb) compared to XP which fit on one CD. Mostly because Microsoft have stuck all the variants (business, home basic, home premium, ultimate, home basic N, business N, and starter) all on one one disk. So, I've some blank DVDs and a burner, so try to burn it. Forget the recipe for the "new" burner (only had it a year) but figure it out fairly quickly. Voila, a DVD. Mount it. Hmm, only one file. It says it's a UDF image, not an ISO after all. I wonder what that is. Try Google. Aha, it's a new format used on optical media like DVDs (but not by Redhat/Fedora, which still uses ISO - with Rock Ridge extensions to get the file permissions etc.). Ah, it's even supported in Fedora Core 4 so I can just mount with "-t udf". Bingo, install files.

Hmm, now what. The target machine doesn't have a DVD drive, and I don't want to install it on my desktop, or even reboot, because then I'd lose all the stuff on my screen or worse, the boot block. That was the only choice - a single big ISO (ahem, UDF) which expects to be booted directly on the target machine. The equivalent Fedora Core kit has a choice of a DVD ISO or 5 CD-ROMs, or from a single CD one has a choice to install from a CD stack or over the net via NFS, FTRP, HTTP or a hard drive image.

Think, think .. maybe it will work from a hard drive image; there's a file called "setup.exe". Boot Fedora rescue disk, shuffle some partitions and create a VFAT one. Tar up the DVD contents (why not just copy the UDF image ? Didn't think of it; duh.) and try to copy them with scp. Won't work; rescue OS won't spawn sub-processes or some such. But wget will. Put the tarball in a Web directory and try to get it. Dang; Apache won't serve files that big. OK, split it into 100Mb slices, copy them across and concatenate them back into the tarball.

Right, a tarball on the target machine. Untar it into the target VFAT partition. Tar gives some error occasionally about "can't create hard link" in VFAT. Hmm, that must be one of the advanced features of UDF. Looks like there are links between some language pack and the install pack.

So, the Vista pacakge is now on a Windows drive on the target machine.

the install

The target machine had had FC1 on it, then XP, then FC4, then XP, and was back to FC4. So I try booting a DOS disk, thinking that maybe it will see the D: drive and run the setup program. Nope. "This program will not run in DOS mode". So it looks like it's back to installing XP as I don't have a bootable Win98 disk (do they exist?). Hm, it won't install. Sh*t, the disk has a crack in it out from the centre and I never made a backup. I've never seen that before. It's not like I've mistreated it or anything; it's a genuine paid-for Microsoft disk with the hologram effect, only been used a handful of times and has been kept in a jewel case. I know the thing wants a serial number to install; I don't know if they are all different or all the same or what. What does one do if the distribution disk breaks ? For the only other commercial software I regularly play with, Garmin Mapsource, I think I can download the software off the Web and it will work with the unlock codes I bought. A cursory search of the Web for Windows XP download fails to turn up anything germane apart from what I suspect are cracked serial numbers that would activate it supposing that I had a good CD in the first place. Not my problem - I have a serial number, but no CD.

I decide to persist a bit longer. CD's are supposed to have error correction; maybe it will work. After several tries I manage to copy it to an ISO file with "dd", and burn a new copy. The crack looks even longer now. Bingo, the new CD works, though I think the splash page went missing.

So, reinstall XP, then run Vista setup. It complains it can't find some files. Maybe something to do with those hard links. Fire up winscp2. Aha, it has sync and compare features. Neat. Change into the correct directory both ends and run sync. OK, something changed. Try Vista setup again. OK ... but no, it says it needs 512Mb of RAM and I only have 235. I never did read the system requirements - this PC runs XP and FC4 with space left over so why not Vista. But wait - a spare PC a few feet away. Maybe it has some memory I can borrow... yes! Reboot, re-run Vista setup ... it needs 300Mb of space and I only have 200 or something, having shrunk the partition to make room for the install kit. I wonder if XP has some junk I can delete, like help files. Yes, but not enough.

I've got an old copy of Partition Magic someone lent me; I wonder what I can do with that. Hmm, it's not entirely happy with NTFS and I had used that for XP. It won't move the partitions the way I want them, so I boot the FC4 rescue disk and try fdisk. Let's see .. partition magic shrank the VFAT partition with the install kit, but would not let me create a new VFAT partition. So I create a second VFAT partition in the hole with fdisk

started with:
MBR | NTFS | VFAT | swap | EXT2
then using partition magic, shrink VFAT and delete swap:
MBR | NTFS | VFAT | hole | EXT2
then with fdisk:
MBR | NTFS | VFAT | VFAT | EXT2

Then I copy the install kit from the first VFAT partition to the second, delete the first partition and create a new bigger VFAT one:

MBR | VFAT | VFAT | EXT2

Next, try to install XP in the first VFAT partition. It works, but won't boot. Guess XP doesn't like to boot a VFAT partition created by Linux. I should have guessed that... try FIXBOOT and FIXMBR from the XP install disk repair suite, but no good. Try to reformat during XP install. Still not happy. Boot DOS, try DOS fdisk. It won't delete the partition because it thinks there's a logical drive on it, which it won't remove because it can't find it. Boot FC4 rescue, remove partition with Linux fdisk, boot DOS, create a new one with DOS fdisk. Try to format it but it won't because there's junk in the disk label and it wants me to type the disk label before it will work. Or something like that. Anyway, finally reformat as FAT in XP install and get XP rebooted.

Vista Setup runs; it wants a product key from a sticker but will proceed without. Let's try "starter". It says I can't upgrade from XP because it needs 6.5Gb of space to do that, which I don't have on this partition. Guess I should have made the install kit partition smaller and this one larger.. Try "custom" which says it will allow me to resize partitions etc. Next page appears to say it won't work as it must be installed on an NTFS partition. I thought it would offer me the option to reformat, like the XP install did. It appears not.

Day 2

So, try to convert C: partition to NTFS and maybe make it bigger. Using XP, copy install kit from D: to C:\vista. Then use Partition Magic to remove D: and grow C:. It generates some errors doing this, but it seems they are not critical as the machine reboots and disk check runs OK.

This version of Partition Magic won't create a D: partition bigger than 2G, and I need 2.6. Boot FC4 again and run fdisk to create a FAT partition and mkfs.vfat to put a filesystem on it. Then reboot XP. Then use "convert c: /fs:ntfs" from command line to change C: to NTFS without reinstalling XP. convert schedules itself to run after the next reboot since the disk is in use. Clever. Now have

MBR | NTFS | VFAT | EXT2

After XP reboots, copy install kit back to D:. Then run setup. Yes, Microsoft did email me a key string (right at the bottom of the email). Hooray, it works. It says it will reboot several times during the install, and it's not kidding.

One-pass install

What would probably have worked if I had RTFM and thought things through

Make sure there's 512Mb of RAM
Create a bootable NTFS partition of at least 7Gb (e.g. /dev/hda1)
Create a FAT partition of at least 3Gb (e.g. /dev/hda2)
Make another 3Gb available, maybe in the same FAT partition
Download the UDF DVD image file from here
Check email from Microsoft for a product key

Using Knoppix or some other Linux, mount the UDF image using the loopback device, something like:

# mkdir /tmp/vista_5600
# mount -t udf -o loop=/dev/loop0 /tmp/vista_5600.16384.060829-2230_x86fre_client-lr1cfre_en_dvd.iso /tmp/vista_5600

Copy the files to the FAT partition, something like:

# mkdir /tmp/hda2
# mount -t vfat /dev/hda2 /tmp/hda2
# cp -a /tmp/vista_5600/* /tmp/hda2

Install Windows XP (or Win2k, or some version that understands NTFS) on /dev/hda1
Boot it, and run D:\Setup.exe

(there may be some equivalent to loopback mount in Windows, in which case you can just download the UDF image in XP and extract the files directly)

or, just burn a DVD and boot it like Microsoft intended you to

Andrew Daviel