Vista Black Screen of Death

Got a nice taste of the wonderful world of Vista today. I tried to install it on my Raid 0 (hpt374). I was excited that it let me load the drivers from a CD instead of a floppy disk. Progress! All goes well except once I reboot it tells me the install is corrupt. Can't seem to find the winload.exe file. Of course it can't, it hasn't loaded the drivers for the raid yet! Went to the recovery console and I was right. No drivers were copied over. How does that make sense? So, I don't know too much about how windows works and definitely not a lot about how Vista works, so I said forget it, I'll install it on my regular old ATA drive.

Of course, I need to partition it. So I use ntfsresize (in linux) and fdisk (quick tutorial coming next post). Pop in the vista CD and... nothing. Sweet sweet blackness. OK, maybe more than nothing, it says its loading, I see the word "Microsoft" and a status bar, and then that disappears and then nothing. How convenient. Maybe I was supposed to just sit around and wait for a while, but I didn't hear anything spinning around so I figured it was dead. Must have been the ntfsresize. I know I'm supposed to run chkdsk on the drive after I use ntfsresize, but I didn't expect this kind of result.

So, to fix it, I pop in the Windows XP cd (thanksfully I had it around). Go into the command line, run chkdsk on the drive. Reboot using the Vista disk and voila, now it works. Finally got it working. All 7.5GBs of it.

Progress indeed.