What a *#! POS Windows Vista is, and HP for using it!

[krishna.murphy]

Well, it is, very often. Excuse my french, but I'm frustrated with the netbook we got for our daughter right now. I updated the sucker to the latest SP when we got it at Christmas, but the girl has simply not gotten used to doing anything with it because it's too slow and funky. She wanted Vista, though, and my wife was against using Linux because she thought the girl'd have difficulty and be lost when trying to interface with a M$oft-centric world.

So, long story short, I set out to downgrade the beast to XP, 'cause then she'd have M$ AND a more responsive (albeit older) OS. I squeezed the partition down with Knoppix, booting from my flash drive, set up a new partition for XP with FAT32, and booted from the XP install CD on a portable CD/DVD drive. So far, so good, but then it's time to deal with the new hardware and an old OS - and sure enough, there was trouble. I couldn't get either a floppy-copy (USB drive again!) of the SATA driver or a slip-streamed (custom) XP install disk to work, nor does Knoppix have all the drivers it needs, for that matter.

So now it's either switch to debian and deal with all that entails, or get Win7 ($79.50 at WalMart or take a chance on a torrent-version), or some other netbook-centric distro, or ??? And it should be soon, 'cause Vista won't boot right any more. Anybody got a suggestion?

Krishna

[Clinton]

You could restore it to factory condition with the manufacturer's "restore" CD, couldn't you? That would take you back to the original OS and get over your Vista not booting.

When installing XP, couldn't you create a small partition on the hard disk before you start installing and put the SATA driver etc there? Or would the XP installation require those to be on an external drive?

Incidentally, why did you choose FAT32 for the XP partition?

[krishna.murphy]

Yes, that's possible, though not especially desirable since it would rule out ever getting back the fixed-up version of Vista that was on the old partition. I spent a fair amount of time getting it running as right as it could and installed a lot of stuff - which would all be down the tubes if I just "restore" using the ROM-and-hidden-partition system that's built in. So I'm hoping for a reasonably quick fix with another OS - with many goodies builtin - that will give me time to figure out what happened.

Slipstreaming had been on my agenda for a while, but it's not as easy as it looked on first blush. You have to extract the desired stuff from a self-installing "driver" file - once you find the right one - to integrate it in to the new ISO. Since it only wants to do its thing on the system with that hardware... Catch 22, as they say.

And floppies are the only mechanism that M$oft allows for driver install during the OS-installation process, AFAICT. In fact, it won't even look at the CD drive, let alone the hd. FAT32 - this is the one-and-only non-NTFS file system that M$oft will allow XP to install on, AFAIK.

Krishna