So I thought it wouild be cool if I installed Microsoft Windows Vista. You know… preview the newest OS from MS before it hits the market. After running through the first part of the installation procedure where it asked me for the product key, the installation volume and the installation type the computer prompted me to restart. “Ok” I said. Routine, right? Wrong.

After the computer booted, I what I saw flashed before my eyes in a haze of colors. First, the boot screen. Something about “Legacy version of Windows” and “Longhorn setup.” The delay must have been about 2 seconds because the screen went blank soon after. Next I see the Windows Longhorn boot screen. Sweet. What happened next kinda took me by suprise. The OS flashed a Blue Screen of Death, and immediately restarted. There was no time to see the error message, so I just let the computer boot again. Same thing; boot prompt, flash Longhorn screen, flash BSoD.

It was about then I said a few choice four-letter words. After the computer booted again, I waited until the boot prompt showed, and selected “Legacy (pre-Longhorn) Windows OS” (Long-winded way of saying “Windows XP Pro.”) The computer booted normally from there. I then thought, uh oh… the Vista install overwrote my boot.ini file. I’ve done other multi-boot systems, and whenever the other OS fails, I always went in and removed the entry from the boot.ini to correct the problem. I went to check my precious boot.ini file. I ran msconfig and sure enough there was a cute message in there saying,

;Warning: Boot.ini is used on Windows XP and earlier operating systems.
;Warning: Use BCDEDIT.exe to modify Windows Vista boot options.

Other than those wonderful comments, the rest of the file seemed fine. Damn. Hmmm… more investingation I needed. So I opened up my c:\ drive to see what it overwrote. I noticed two new files. Boot.BAK and BOOTSECT.BAK Well, that’s where my original boot.ini file went to. Great. And it also appears that the Vista install killed the boot-sector on my NTFS partition. Swell.

I then noticed a few new folders on the drive too. In partitcular, one called “Boot,” which of course was hidden. Well, doesn’t that look interesting. In this folder were a few nifty looking files. bootfix.bin, fixfat.exe, fixntfs.exe… Oh look at that. I like the sound of fixntfs. I opened up my command-prompt and plugged in c:\Boot\fixntfs.exe. Low-and-behold, I get some documentation on usage:

Usage: fixntfs -xp | -lh [-all]
Replaces NTFS bootcode on NTFS-formatted partitions.
-xp - Use XP-compatible bootcode.
-lh - Use Longhorn-compatible bootcode.
-all - Replace on all partitions (default is only system partition)

… “Use XP-compatible bootcode.” Couldn’t hurt. I run c:\Boot\fixntfs.exe -xp. Well, everything seems fine. Well, after a reboot, everything went back to normal and I got my XP booting computer back. I took what happened as a sign, and have since deleted all the Vista files on my drives. I think I’ll wait till the retail release… hopefully they’ll have fixed this and there will only be 999,999 bugs.