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Upgrading Vista RC2 - Save 3 Hours

In my last post I pondered whether one could upgrade from Vista RC2 to the RTM version without paving your machine. I read Scott Hanselman's post and thought, wow, if Scott's gonna try the upgrade route, good enough for me.

You would have thought I learned my lesson after trying to upgrade from XP to RC2....but noooo...gotta try it again. Here's a run-down of my evening...

Download the Vista RTM .iso file from MSDN...took about 3 hours
Burn the .iso to DVD
Start the upgrade process from Vista RC2 to RTM
Installation starts and all looks good!! It says I can upgrade to Vista RTM. It says a couple of apps like SQL Server 2005 and some things I don't care about may have problems. Dive in!
Installation wizard says the upgrade could take several hours. I can deal with that since it will be maintaining all my stuff and pulling forward to the RTM version.
Installation wizard was not lying. It takes a long time, but things are nice and smooth
Windows is preparing to start for the first time...wooo hoo!
Windows starts for the first time, but apparently it still has lots to do. Wait another 1/2 hour

Then it happened. Three hours in and Boom! The wizard reports that the Vista installation encountered an error...click OK to rollback to your prior version.Crud!

So, nothing to do but click that OK button and hope for the best. So, I do and it runs through the rollback of my previous button. All the while, I'm really hoping for the best. I have good backups, but I need this thing running tomorrow morning. What if it's hosed?

Well after the rollback runs, I'm left with a black screen and a flashing cursor. No hard disk activity. What's it doing? Apparently nothing. I wait 10 minutes and cold reboot. Thankfully, my previous version of Vista comes back up and all is back to normal.

So, I knew that upgrading from an RC version to the RTM version was a crap-shoot. Apparently I lost this roll of the die. I can deal with it. I've just got to find some time to do a double back-up of my stuff, pave the box and re-install the RTM version. Big pain to re-install everything, for sure.

My biggest gripe with this is the fact that I could get 99% of the way through installation before it crapped out. I mean, what in the world could have caused that, and, more importantly, couldn't the installer have figured that out ahead of time? I know these are complex things, especially an upgrade of an OS, rather than a fresh install, but come on. Wouldn't it have been helpful to at least report the exact problem? Maybe it hit a certain driver or application that could not be upgraded. After the roll-back I could address that...or search the web for a resoution. Instead, I got a message that an error occurred and my system would be rolled back. Thanks.

Living on the software edge hurts sometimes...maybe more than just sometimes.

Tags Windows Vista Vista RTM Vista Upgrade

posted by John Walker @ 11/17/2006 3:51:00 AM

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Upgrading Vista RC2 - Save 3 Hours

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