At long last, I’m back on the good ship Vista!

When I last wrote in late June I was waiting out the weather and getting ready to install Vista Beta 2. After the weather cleared, clouds appeared during my attempt to install Vista, Beta 2.

I wanted to have a separate partition on my “D” drive for the Beta test. I was using Acronis Disk Director Suite to partition the drive and it kept coming back and saying there were errors on the drive. I ran a chkdsk and defrag and XP said all was well. Obviously all was not well.

I keep my data files on my “D” drive, which is a completely separate hard drive from my “C” drive. I found that I was able to create a partition on the “C” drive, but I really did not want both OSes on the same drive.

My next step was to use Western Digital’s Diagnostic Tools to check my drive. I moved all of my files from “D” to “C” so there was nothing on my “D” drive. I ran a regular check of the drive and it reported errors. I asked it to fix the errors and after running that utility the tool came back and said all was fixed.

I then tried to once again partition the drive and still got the error message that there were bad blocks. At this point I got serious… I decided to do a low level format and write zeros to the drive. That took about 30 minutes. I used Acronis Disk Director to partition the drive and a loud “YES” was heard through the house - it had worked!

I then proceeded to install Windows Vista Beta 2 onto the partition on Drive “D.” It is now on the machine, but not without some installation issues. I will save the specifics for the next article in this series. A small hint: The downloaded copy of Vista installed, whereas the DVD that arrived in the mail would not.

More to come…

[tags]vista,format,connie devine,acronis,beta 2,western digital’s diagnostic tools[/tags]