The first setup experience and first pain

[George Valkov]

Vista-RC1.Setup doesn`t like the partition I choosed for vista. It won`t let
me know why, perhaps it wants me to play guessing What a playfull setup!

Whatever: I spent 5 hours moving disks, cables, switching jumpers and
reformated the partition like 10 times to make it work. Cool!

Reasons:
~ Target disk MUST be /dev/hda (primary master)
~ Target partition MUST be marked active (bootable)
~ Target disk MUST be NTFS (and not UDF)
~ Target disk MUST use default alocation unit (cluster) size. 64KB is not
permited -- strange why? My primary installation is Windows 2003-SP1
enterprise server and boots from /dev/hda1 NTFS 64KB clusters. What's the
largest supported cluster size by setup?

Cheers, after the whole pain, setup accepted /dev/hda2 (primary master,
partition 2). After the first setup phase, I moved the disk to /dev/hdd
(secondary slave) and reconnected the two other dynamic disks. Setup
completed successfully!

Finally there are two more problems:
1. I used diskpart to change the target partition's drive letter to T:, but
after the installation it was using C:. How do I force a custom drive
letter?
2 How do I create a boot menu, to select startup partition at boot time? I
want to choose between:
/dev/hdd1 (windows server)
/dev/hdd2 (windows vista)
/dev/hdd3 (linux slackware)
Please don`t tell me about 3rd party software. Can I do this from Vista or
2k3-server-SP1, or should I reconfigure the LILO (Linux Loader) and boot
from the Linux partition?

LEGEND:
/hda is primary master
/hdd is secondary slave
/hdd1 is first partition on hdd and so on. I use the unix naming because it
is short and precise.


I am asking Microsoft to fix these problems for the final release of Vista.
And if MS is to lazy to create a graphical interfase to formatting options
and choosing drive letters, at least make sure that the diskpart.exe
utility's settings and drive letter assignments) will take effect after
installation. Can`t you simply offer the Disk Management console?

 

[Theo]

Your comment about "Target disk MUST be NTFS
(and not UDF)" caught my attention.

"The Universal Disk Format (UDF) is a format
specification of a file system for storing files
on optical media. It is an implementation of the
ISO/IEC 13346 standard (also known as ECMA-167).
It is considered to be a replacement of ISO
9660, and today is widely used for (re)writable
optical media. UDF is developed and maintained
by the Optical Storage Technology Association
(OSTA)."

Did you mean to say "FAT or FAT32" instead?

 

[Theo]

George,

I will be honest with, I never paid any attention to the format. I just
let Nero take care of it based on what type of DVD I was making. So, I
don't have any recommendations.

I will look at the capability to format a hard drive to UDF, although I
don't know of any advantage to it at the moment.

 

[George Valkov]

Hello Theo!
Can you tell me what format is recommended for DVD+/-R disk at once:
ISO9660 only;?
ISO9660+UDF?
UDF only?
I currently use ISO9660+UDF and always finalyze the disk. I also change the
book-type to DVD-ROM for DVD+R disks.

Would You recommend me a good file-system driver to enable UDF support on
XP/2k3? If you know of any that:
1: does not use/install any lower/upper filters on my DVD-burner.
2: does not need any service running in background
please let me know. The 1: is because lower/upper filters cause a lot of
pain and problems conflicting with CD/DVD burning software. 2: is for the
same reason.

I don`t know much about UDF. I know it`s used to make CDs DVDs behave more
like a hard disk and to alow files larger than 2GB.

Because of its name: Universal Disk Format I did expect it to be universal
format - not just for optical media, but for others as well. My expectation
were just proved to be right as the beta 2 and now the RC1 of Vista came
out.
Run Command Prompt either from Vista or from Vista Setup disk. type:
format /?
or
format X: /FS:UDF /V:UDF-hard-disk /Q /X
to see that UDF is now available for hard-disks. Now copy some files and
folders on the disk, and restart to XP or 2003 server. You will be notified
that you are runnig out of space on the disk, because XP/2k3 does not have
built-in write support for UDF (unless you have installed inCD). You still
have read only access to any hard-disk using UDF from XP/2k3 system.