Windows 7 RC and Me

This weekend I installed the recently released Windows 7 RC.

My goal was to dual boot Windows XP and Windows 7.  Apparently that was not to be.

I had most encouraging attempts at installing the new release over the weekend.  My main issue was how insanely long it took to install.  When I say long, I mean it was counted in hours.

The first install was taking so long that I also forced a reset.  It was sitting on Completing Installation for so long without any sign of progress other than the tiny little animation with the “…” that I started to hold the Power button on the PC to force a reset.  One Mississippi… Two Mississippi… Three… Holy cr4p the install just came to life!  Abort Reset!  Abort Reset!!!

The first install seemed to work just fine but I went and did a silly thing.  I have a number of partitions set up and I have assigned specific letters to them in XP which I wanted to do in Win7 as well.  The only issue is Win7 decided to assign “D:” to the XP partition.  I didn’t like that as I always set “D:” to my “Development” partition.

So I happily went along an dutifully renamed all the partitions.

Then it didn’t want to reboot anymore.

Sigh…

There is a trick to reassigning a System drive.  I had forgotten to implement it.  Time to reinstall Win7 again.

The next time, just play failed.

It ended up taking so long that next attempt that I gave up and left it “installing” over night.  Unfortunately at some point it crashed and every time it tried to recover it would complain that it had previously crashed and I should restart so that it would recover and continue where it left off.  It kinda felt like Groundhog Day seeing that message over and over again.

So then again I go through the pain of insanely long installs… except the third was relatively speedy.  For a moment there I had tried disconnecting my external drives having vaguely recalled that there was an issue with them some time again.

It seemed to do the trick.

Shame this install didn’t pick up the “Legacy” install of XP.

I tried everything I could think of.  I even resorted to restoring the XP partition from back-up even though it was a little dated - by only a couple of months mind you.  Strangely that didn’t help.  The XP partition wouldn’t boot and would keep reporting the Boot.ini file was corrupt and the NTDETECT failed.

Sigh…

So maybe I should take the plunge and commit to Win7 100% and finally dropping XP once and for all.

Time for another install.  No point keeping that XP partition any longer, I’ll move Win7 into pole position on the HDD.

So here I am, onto my fourth or fifth install of Windows 7 RC.  It took forever again… Sigh.

I have no major complaints really other my installation issues.  Most of which were caused by my own ineptitude but the speed of installation was worrisome.

I now have a shiny new install of Windows 7 RC.  I am now rested and calm again.  All that is left now is to install every other application I need to complete my PC…  Visual Studio… Add-ins… SQL Server… Subversion… Browsers… Tools… Utilities… ad infinitum…

A geeks job is never done…