A
Adam Albright
Maybe I should have titled this thread the Never Ending Story. Vista
is seriously flawed in its first retail release, badly broken in many
areas, buggy as hell and they claim it was tested extensively. I can
not and will no longer recommend this pile of crap to anybody. Surely
not to anybody that has more than a basic system. If you have a more
advanced system you will suffer long trying to get things to work and
likely in the end fail or be forced to compromise to make having
upgraded to Vista an expensive but useless experience unless you enjoy
slow torture.
As I've said previously I have several SATA hard drives, both internal
and external. They did work fine under XP Pro.
1. I have a state of art "Vista Ready" motherboard, a Gigabyte
GA-965P-DQ6.
2. I have already installed the latest Intel Storage Martix
XP/Vista combination IDE controllers and SATA controller drivers.
3. All the SATA drives are Seagate, a trusted and preferred brand and
nearly brand new, each between 300 and 750 GB in size.
As I've also said Vista works with these drives in IDE mode. In fact I
have suggested several times for people to put these drives in IDE
mode until Vista was up and running. Today I decided to restore BIOS
to SATA mode so my many hard drives work up to speed. That was a
mistake. The next hour was nothing but a cascading series of failure
after failure from both the Award BIOS and sadly again Vista.
Read in horror how truly dumb all the involved parties are. I blame
them all, Microsoft, Award BIOS, Intel and Gigabyte.
Read in horror how badly flawed this release of Windows is and how it
will drive you to the brink of sanity trying to get it do what it is
suppose to.
Here in detail is my latest misadventure with Vista:
1. I go to BIOS and change back to SATA mode.
2. I reboot and see the AHCI copyright notice.
3. I see the typical early BOOT phases and the BIOS
sees all the drives including the SATA ones on the SATA
controllers.
4. Boot fails, says can't find OS. I don't panic, seen this before
under XP. The problem and it is so stupid, is for some odd reason
you got to put SATA drives on the controllers one at a time, then
reboot, get into Windows, see if things are ok, shut down, add the
next one and repeat.
5. I pull out all but the first SATA drive and reboot. No more can't
find OS error, but once in Windows, it now is too stupid to see
the drive. OK fine, I'll look under Device Manager. No, the drive
isn't listed, but Vista did decide to add another instance of the
IDE controller, two lines, one each for channel 0 and 1. The
problem here is my MB doesn't have two sets of channels, it just
has a single IDE channel, 0 and 1. Vista now says I got two and of
course puts the yellow warning flag on them.
6. Now the real fun begins. Old time users of Windows knows one way
to clear hardware issues the Device Manager nags about is to
remove ALL the items in a particular category. So I try.
7. Vista being so totally brain dead don't let me. Instead it just
flashes, comes back and now I have 3 pair! I spend the next 15
minutes trying to get rid of these extrenous lies and finally
manage to get back down to just one extra pair.
8. Meanwhile Vista is going nuts. It keeps bringing up the found new
hardware window, shows a progress bar as it tries to add the
driver, then end up saying IDE channel failed. Now Vista is stuck
in endless loops where its now a game to see if I can delete the
bogus lines before Vista tries to add them back.
9. More wasted time and getting no where fast so I decide, the hell
with it. I manage to shut down then return to BIOS to put
everything back to IDE like it was. You would think that would
fix things. No way!
10. Hoping to avoid more errors, I first pulled all the drives
leaving only my boot C drive which is a ATA IDE drive.
11. I reboot and get into Windows and see Vista showing "found
new hardware", and my first SATA drive is back, but running in
IDE mode. Well, at least its running.
12. I restore my other internal SATA drives. Windows sees them.
13. I now try to turn on one of my external SATA drives. These
worked fine under IDE mode before in both XP and Vista. Not
any more! Now Vista don't see any external SATA drive regardless
what I do.
14. Obviously I'm not thrilled. I've wasted over a hour messing
around and I'm in worse shape then when I started in spite of
returning things to how they were.
15. My misery isn't over. Lucky for me my external SATA drives have
the option of running in USB 2.0 mode. Slower, but at least I
should be able to get to my data. I try, and I can.
16. Another problem due to brain dead Vista. Anyone that uses
external USB devices knows you should unmount them from the
task bar and wait till Windows says it is ok to remove. The
point here is if just shut off a drive that still may be trying to
read or write to a file you can corrupt that file or the whole
drive. So I click on the button. Vista says I can't turn it off
because it claims another application is accessing the drive.
17. Vista is lying again. I confirm I turned all applications off even
if they didn't access the external drive in question. Same stupid
message. The details are mind numbingly stupid. I have a older
external USB drive. It only uses USB 2.0. The damn thing isn't
on, but apparently Vista thinks it is and shows a line to turn
if off. BUT IT ISN'T ON and I know the new one isn't accessing
anything, yet Vista says I can't turn either off safely.
So now for my efforts instead of getting my SATA drives to work up to
speed I had to cripple them to run slower and now I never know if it
is safe or not to turn them off running is USB mode which presents
more bugs.
Damn Microsoft "software engineers" get you act together!
is seriously flawed in its first retail release, badly broken in many
areas, buggy as hell and they claim it was tested extensively. I can
not and will no longer recommend this pile of crap to anybody. Surely
not to anybody that has more than a basic system. If you have a more
advanced system you will suffer long trying to get things to work and
likely in the end fail or be forced to compromise to make having
upgraded to Vista an expensive but useless experience unless you enjoy
slow torture.
As I've said previously I have several SATA hard drives, both internal
and external. They did work fine under XP Pro.
1. I have a state of art "Vista Ready" motherboard, a Gigabyte
GA-965P-DQ6.
2. I have already installed the latest Intel Storage Martix
XP/Vista combination IDE controllers and SATA controller drivers.
3. All the SATA drives are Seagate, a trusted and preferred brand and
nearly brand new, each between 300 and 750 GB in size.
As I've also said Vista works with these drives in IDE mode. In fact I
have suggested several times for people to put these drives in IDE
mode until Vista was up and running. Today I decided to restore BIOS
to SATA mode so my many hard drives work up to speed. That was a
mistake. The next hour was nothing but a cascading series of failure
after failure from both the Award BIOS and sadly again Vista.
Read in horror how truly dumb all the involved parties are. I blame
them all, Microsoft, Award BIOS, Intel and Gigabyte.
Read in horror how badly flawed this release of Windows is and how it
will drive you to the brink of sanity trying to get it do what it is
suppose to.
Here in detail is my latest misadventure with Vista:
1. I go to BIOS and change back to SATA mode.
2. I reboot and see the AHCI copyright notice.
3. I see the typical early BOOT phases and the BIOS
sees all the drives including the SATA ones on the SATA
controllers.
4. Boot fails, says can't find OS. I don't panic, seen this before
under XP. The problem and it is so stupid, is for some odd reason
you got to put SATA drives on the controllers one at a time, then
reboot, get into Windows, see if things are ok, shut down, add the
next one and repeat.
5. I pull out all but the first SATA drive and reboot. No more can't
find OS error, but once in Windows, it now is too stupid to see
the drive. OK fine, I'll look under Device Manager. No, the drive
isn't listed, but Vista did decide to add another instance of the
IDE controller, two lines, one each for channel 0 and 1. The
problem here is my MB doesn't have two sets of channels, it just
has a single IDE channel, 0 and 1. Vista now says I got two and of
course puts the yellow warning flag on them.
6. Now the real fun begins. Old time users of Windows knows one way
to clear hardware issues the Device Manager nags about is to
remove ALL the items in a particular category. So I try.
7. Vista being so totally brain dead don't let me. Instead it just
flashes, comes back and now I have 3 pair! I spend the next 15
minutes trying to get rid of these extrenous lies and finally
manage to get back down to just one extra pair.
8. Meanwhile Vista is going nuts. It keeps bringing up the found new
hardware window, shows a progress bar as it tries to add the
driver, then end up saying IDE channel failed. Now Vista is stuck
in endless loops where its now a game to see if I can delete the
bogus lines before Vista tries to add them back.
9. More wasted time and getting no where fast so I decide, the hell
with it. I manage to shut down then return to BIOS to put
everything back to IDE like it was. You would think that would
fix things. No way!
10. Hoping to avoid more errors, I first pulled all the drives
leaving only my boot C drive which is a ATA IDE drive.
11. I reboot and get into Windows and see Vista showing "found
new hardware", and my first SATA drive is back, but running in
IDE mode. Well, at least its running.
12. I restore my other internal SATA drives. Windows sees them.
13. I now try to turn on one of my external SATA drives. These
worked fine under IDE mode before in both XP and Vista. Not
any more! Now Vista don't see any external SATA drive regardless
what I do.
14. Obviously I'm not thrilled. I've wasted over a hour messing
around and I'm in worse shape then when I started in spite of
returning things to how they were.
15. My misery isn't over. Lucky for me my external SATA drives have
the option of running in USB 2.0 mode. Slower, but at least I
should be able to get to my data. I try, and I can.
16. Another problem due to brain dead Vista. Anyone that uses
external USB devices knows you should unmount them from the
task bar and wait till Windows says it is ok to remove. The
point here is if just shut off a drive that still may be trying to
read or write to a file you can corrupt that file or the whole
drive. So I click on the button. Vista says I can't turn it off
because it claims another application is accessing the drive.
17. Vista is lying again. I confirm I turned all applications off even
if they didn't access the external drive in question. Same stupid
message. The details are mind numbingly stupid. I have a older
external USB drive. It only uses USB 2.0. The damn thing isn't
on, but apparently Vista thinks it is and shows a line to turn
if off. BUT IT ISN'T ON and I know the new one isn't accessing
anything, yet Vista says I can't turn either off safely.
So now for my efforts instead of getting my SATA drives to work up to
speed I had to cripple them to run slower and now I never know if it
is safe or not to turn them off running is USB mode which presents
more bugs.
Damn Microsoft "software engineers" get you act together!