tbradshaw.net

So I’ve been debating for quite some time about installing Windows so that I could give some games a shot. (Specifically World of Warcraft, Black and White 2, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas)

I’ve left space on my hard drive, but one thing has always held me back. After purchasing this computer and entering the “modern era” of hardware, I’ve been enjoying my configuration and never looking back. There were a few growing pains when I first got my new setup, but Linux has always been right on top of all the latest hardware changes.

And this is the part that kills me. I’ve got a couple nice SATA hard drives. One fast one that I use for my boot drive, and a large slower one that I use for storage. However, Windows XP has no support for SATA drives during installation. They do have an option to load drivers during the installation, but of course with a catch. They have to be on a floppy. I haven’t had a floppy drive in years and I have no intention of putting one in.

So it’s an interesting situation, Windows XP, the supposed pinnacle of typical computing, the “works with all hardware” operating system, can’t even install on hardware from the last several years while I can burn any Linux distribution’s LiveCD and be running in 5 minutes or less.

I thought that I might have work around, though, when I noticed the release of the Beta 2 version of “Longhorn”, now called Windows Vista. I figured, “Hell, this operating system isn’t even going to be released until next year. It has to have SATA support in the installation.”

I figured wrong. I was stunned to find out that not even an attempt was made at supporting SATA during the installation of Windows Vista. However, one serious improvement was made: now instead of requiring a floppy drive (a technology that is overdue to be taken behind the shed and shot) they allow the drivers to be located on a CD-ROM or USB Flash Drive.

“Hey, that’s not too shabby,” I thought.

Then things start to get screwed up as only Microsoft can do it. After copying the drivers over to JD’s thumb drive and clicking the “Load Drivers…” button, I was confused by the lack of interaction. Turns out I’m not privileged enough to actually browse for the driver, it has to just search on it’s own. (The auto-search for drivers has always sucked, and I’ve never used it… why make it mandatory?)

A little reading on some online forums reveals that no searching is done past the root folder of all attached drives. Hmph. Fine. So I copy the specific drive files to the root of the thumb drive. Still nothing. So I crawl under my desk to see what’s going on… and I don’t even see any activity lights on the USB flash drive except for the initial insertion. Fine… so the thumb drive driver thing doesn’t actually work.

So next I burn a CD with the same files on it (driver in the root!) and sure enough this time Windows Vista reads the .inf file and gives me some options for loading a driver. And I do. But it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, Vista still doesn’t see my hard drives.

It was at this point that I gave up. I don’t want to play games bad enough to deal with Microsoft’s stupidity in the installation process. I’ll go back to my Gentoo installation and GNOME environment where things just work. Or at least if they don’t work, there’s a decent reason why.

It’s a good thing that Microsoft has swindled Windows into the “default install” position on almost every OEM computer on the planet, because if end consumers bought a new computer and had to install Vista on it, they would most certainly fail. And I would be happy to hand them an Ubuntu installation CD.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 at 12:33 am and is filed under , Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.