OK. I was able to use mozilla's download manager to dl the vista 2 beta from MS without any problems.

I burnt the DVD at 8x, and set my bios to load the DVD drive first.

Reboot the system, get an error about no boot environment available. System boots into Mandriva linux.

Go back into the bios, set the DVD as the only bootable device. Same error.

Disable APIC support on the BIOS, boot DVD. It loads. I have no idea why I couldn't get the DVD to load with APIC enabled. Right now I'm using Vista still without APIC enabled. My Win2k partition will only boot with APIC enabled. I'm going to mess around this this some more. My motherboard is an ASUS P4T-E. Vista will boot from the harddrive with APIC enabled, but the DVD will not.

I use the setup tools to delete all of my Mandriva partitions to make way for Vista. Three partitions deleted, two created.

Both partitions reformated easily, and tell it which drive to load Vista on.

Copying of files proceeds to 29%, then errors out on a media read error. Quick search on google shows other people having problems with bad DVD burns.

Tried to reboot into Windows 2000 but my boot partition is gone. After some looking around I find this tool on the Vista DVD, bootsect.exe.

So I tell load back into the Vista DVD and select the recovery options. Using the recovery options I open a command prompt. The recovery options on the DVD are very nice. It can load a command prompt that has full access to all drives. NTFS, FAT32, or you can even load drivers for USB/firewire storage devices.

At the command prompt I issue the command bootsect

"bootsect /nt52 C:"

bootsect runs and fixes the MBR and sets up my Win2k OS drive as the boot drive.

Reboot server, system loads into Win2k, but hangs. Change APIC setting to enabled, system boots fine.


Reburn DVD at 2.4x, start install over again.

System loaded without any issues. Took approximately 1 hour.

The display appears to be very crisp. The UI looks much better than XP or Win2k. Installed mozilla without any issues. Installed Java without any issues.




Problems- Could not get shockwave to install on IE7.0. This is to be expected as nobody is coding apps specifically for 7.0 yet.

Shockwave would not autoinstall on Mozilla. Had to use the manual install procedure.

So for the folks that don't have access to run this, let me know if you want anything specifically tested, or what you would like to know more about, and I'll play around and let you know what I find. So far I really like it.