A while back, I posted that I made the move to 64-bit Vista. Then I got an iPhone, which doesn’t have 64-bit drivers, so I downgraded to Vista 32-bit. Well, this weekend, I have had another ordeal – I just finished installing 32-bit Vista again. My primary hard drive is beginning to fail apparently – it did have a handful of bad sectors. I’m fine with that, except Vista refused to boot up so I can do a couple of things like de-activate iTunes, check for any files that I may need to save (mainly installers – I keep all data on a different drive), etc. Well – after trying to boot into Vista in every way I could think of, I decided I’ll go ahead and reinstall. Guess what – the install DVD fails to startup as well! It would try to startup, but then it would hang at the loading screen (black screen with the little green progress bar at the bottom). It appears that Vista’s boot process (from DVD or HDD) can be hung when there is a corrupted partion. I can understand the HDD install not booting, but come on – why can’t the DVD boot?
I ended up getting an iso of the Ultimate Boot CD, running SeaTools to fix up the drive, and then using the disk partioning tools there to wipe the drive clean. After that, the Vista DVD was able to boot just fine and now I’m finally back up and running. This is one of the reasons I keep wanting to switch to Apple though – I know they have issues as well, but I can’t believe the various issues I keep hitting with Vista…granted, I’m a power user so I don’t expect most of the issues I see would cause a problem with “normal” home users, but geez, it’s bad when I’m tempted to downgrade back to XP at least once a week.