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Lüt

"INSTALLING WINDOWS XP IS A BREEZE!", they say

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After 3 and a half weeks and 32 CDRs of backing up, I began my install of Windows XP Professional Sunday afternoon.

I've had some frustrations installing 95 in my time, a little bit of pain with 98, some genuine torture from ME and 3 installs from hell with 2000, but this... this takes the cake.

No, scratch that, this takes the whole fucking bakery.

A nightmare of truly epic proportions.

I began with a hard drive format instead of a patch upgrade, because those always leave old crap behind and cause errors later on. Of course, I didn't have a choice anyway, as XP doesn't patch Win95. Due to the fact that CD installs are worthless and a pain in the ass, I went about determining how to install XP from the hard drive. I had another hard drive with Windows95 setup to use in this PC, so I decided I'd make my main drive the slave, boot to this other Win95 hard drive and copy the CD contents from there via Explorer.

However, this main hard drive of mine refused to be anything but the master. It was either the master, or it disappeared. I tried all jumper settings on the label and then started making my own. Nothing worked.

Seeing as how that wasn't going to work, I gave in to MS and booted from the CD. Setup starts, inspects the system, etc. then it tells me "Your PC does not have a hard disk installed. Please install a hard disk and run setup again. Setup will now reboot your system."

WTF?

I booted from a 95 boot disk, and there the drive was in it's entirety. I figured maybe the format messed up, so I FDisk'ed it, which required another full format.

About 4 hours after beginning, I ran setup for the second time. Drive still isn't there though. Now I know it's an XP problem. For whatever reason, Microsoft's latest and greatest can't recognize an ATA-66 hard drive, which I find amusing since DOS, Win95 and Win98 can see the drive. Oh well, there's the good ole' Microsoft "step forward" in action.

So then the copying begins: the "bootable" root directory on the CD comes down to the hard drive. I figured I could install it from there, or at least boot to it. Copying the root and trying to boot to it on the hard drive was a big failure, so I began copying the entire CD to the drive, starting with the insanely huge I386 directory. I fell asleep while this was copying. Woke up 4 hours later to copy the rest. Of course, you can't copy a whole directory structure in DOS, so I had to dig out FastLynx, which I did AFTER copying the I386 directory - a mistake because Microsoft broke their own rule about not having more than 2,000 files in any one directory by putting 5,390 FUCKING FILES IN ONE DIRECTORY. I had to delete the I386 directory so that the filecopy apps didn't crash with "out of memory" errors, then copy the whole damn thing back after the rest of it's subdirectories were copied. I386 itself takes about an hour to copy and/or delete.

Now that it's all copied, I run setup again to find "this application cannot be run in MS-DOS mode". Hooray!

I noticed the CD root directory fit on a disk, but that didn't boot either. (I know I know, but I was getting desperate.)

So the next day (Monday) I end up on the phone with Microsoft, who sets me up a case and all that, then transfers me to tech support, which suddenly cuts me off after waiting forever, so I have to call AGAIN, and get in line AGAIN. Tech DOES manage to get the install to start from the hard drive, but after copying temporary files, it suddenly can't find the hard drive anymore. DIDN'T SETUP JUST SPEND 20 MINUTES USING IT?!? Worthless shit. Back to square one.

Now, about an hour later after talking with tech, they basically tell me I should go download a patch, which is great news, seeing as how functional my PC was.

Now I'm trying to find somebody's place I can visit to download stuff. Nobody is home of course. I have one last resort, and it turns out he's home from school early, so I went to his house. Of course, I went down the wrong street the first time, and went to a house that LOOKED like his, and the people there were like "wtf?", so I went to the next street and into his house, and there's all these weird people in there looking at me. I'm like, "oh wait, this isn't his house either". So I went 2 houses down and it was finally his house. I got online, went to this website, got to the drivers section, and wha-la, their FTP server was offline.

My last hope is the library.

I get in there OK, but I need a library card to use their computers. After a fair amount of complaining, they accept my drivers license. So I go to the site again, using their completely stupid and hacker-proofed PCs. Hell, there wasn't even a start button on them. So I'm on this site, and I hover the mouse over the drop-down menu to make it drop down, and guess what? You can't click the fucking links. Apparently they had disabled that kind of scripting functionality.

At this point I used google to search for these drivers, and like 12 pages later somebody had the file i was looking for. I went to download it, but my disk was full. I forgot to delete the XP root off of it. That wouldn't be a problem, except I can't delete anything with their damn hacker-proofing installed.

They have to get me on a different PC in a different section of the library. There were 10 personal computer rooms in this section with more access to files and stuff, but no internet. The receptionist tells me "go into booth #2", but there's some bum in there, so I go into the only open booth; a Mac workstation. Trying to delete the files on the Mac fills the disk with this Mac crap and filesystem. While I'm in the process of discovered my disk is trashed, somebody complains I'm in their booth. After a small dispute, the bitch at the front comes back saying "no, i said go into booth #4", which had just been vacated while I was in booth #2. I reformatted the disk in there and got the files off the other PC in the other section.

Got back home, had to hook up another PC to unzip the damn thing, put the disk with the files in this PC, pressed F6 to load 3rd party drivers as XP Setup began, loaded the driver, and it finally recognized the drive.

Like, shit, is ATA66 too much to handle? Fucking Moses on a motorscooter, it's only like 2 or 3 years old. Or older.

Now I run setup for the fourth and final time. It decides it has to remove the temporary files from the previous try. It can't seem to realize they're THE SAME DAMN FILES IT'S GOING TO COPY AGAIN. And of course, it copies them back again. "Copying files to hard drive" it says, apparently unable to realize IT'S ALREADY ON THE FUCKING DRIVE.

Now that it's up and running, it's pretty cool. It's amusing how many times DOS came to the aid of the system trying to eliminate it.

So was it worth it? To this point (5 days later), that's a big and enthusiastic YES.

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Hint of advice: WinXP doesn't like crashing. It took me 2 crashes to reinstall the bastard of a thing.

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AndrewB said:

Mmmmm... Cake...

$#%$@$%!

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PolackNinja: =)
PolackNinja: if you rate win95 at an 8 what would you rate winxp so far?
Wet Drywall: 9.5

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Liam the Bard said:

$#%$@$%!

Liam, you're supposed to do the big CAKE thing, not make a bunch of retarded symbols. Shame.

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Archvile64 said:

Liam, you're supposed to do the big CAKE thing, not make a bunch of retarded symbols. Shame.


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Yay! My new computer is already going to have Windows XP installed for me! I love being a lazy bastard :)

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Liam the Bard said:

[img]http://www.boomspeed.com/liamthebard/cake.jpg[img]

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You already used that one at NewDoom :p

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Heh, I came across that in the Insanity images directory when I was looking for that big transparent BANNED logo thing.

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Installing WinXP was very easy for me, on both my computers, including one with a ATA66 HD:

1. Take out GF2 MX 400, plug in an old S3 Virge 4MB
2. Boot from CD
3. Let setup format HD
4. Install WinXP
5. Take out S3 Virge 4MB, plug in the GF2 MX 400
6. Reboot, use WinXP

Of course, you can't copy a whole directory structure in DOS


xcopy *.* c:\moo /s /e

IIRC that's the CMD line for xcopy (which comes with DOS, /e isn't really used though, but you never know (it's for empty directorys))

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boris said:

xcopy *.* c:\moo /s /e

That wasn't available in the versions I had. I say DOS as the version that comes on the 95/98 boot disks: I know that was a feature in the true pre-Win95 DOS days.

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GooberMan said:

xcopy32 came with win95 to support long file names.

Hmph, which version? I know there were like 3 or more different versions of 95, each had some different utilities. I'm certain my version didn't have that, but whatever, this boot disk definately didn't.

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Archvile64 said:

Heh, I came across that in the Insanity images directory when I was looking for that big transparent BANNED logo thing.


Heh, I remeber that. X-Mas ruled.

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Zaldron said:

Blergh. Boy, a whole new level...

Are you saying I suck or the XP setup sucks?

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I was talking about the Linux gay mascot. Instead of bold tagged fanatic blurbs of flammeable material like :

h e X e n

We get :

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Damn, Lüt. Sounds like XP screwed the pooch like a big dog for you. The 2k setup did the same thing to me (not recognizing drives, randomly refusing to use RAM, etc), but it only took me like four hours total to get it up. Must be my mad skillz.

DC

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Pure bad luck. Installing XP on my dad's PC was immediate (once he got the new hard drive up and running with OnTrack, but that was a motherboard issue).

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That's what I hate about computers. You could probably have a comp with all the same stuff but it would have installed the first time no problems for no other reason that God hates us all.

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