Well that’s that finished

// March 23rd, 2008 // Geeky Stuff, General

I finally got Service Pack 1 installed for Vista last night. It was an absolute nightmare getting it sorted out. If you have a moment, I’ll tell you the tall tale…

It kept failing all the time when it got to “Stage 3” of the installation, and I think I know why it was doing that. I had a bootloader called grub on my PC which gives me the choice to boot up into either Vista or Linux (and also XP, when I had it installed). It was this that was causing the service pack to not install properly because it was expecting the PC to use the standard MBR (Master Boot Record).

Thing is, I don’t use Linux on my PC anymore because I’ve got it on the server, and it doesn’t even boot up anyway. Because of this, for ages I was thinking of fixing up the paritions on my drive. My Vista partition was on the secondary drive and Linux was on the back-end of the primary drive. All the rest of the space was used up by my documents and music etc. The drives were messed up because I used to have XP on the beginning of the primary drive and I was “trying out” Vista along side XP before I moved over to it. What I planned to do eventually was move the Vista partition to the primary drive, remove Linux and grub, and setup the secondary drive to be all one partition. Ya know, all neat and tidy, and I thought maybe now would be a good time to do it.

This, however, proved exceedingly difficult. Firstly I couldn’t find any way of moving the Vista partition, so I thought I’d at least get rid of Linux and grub. Secondly, when I got rid of them, Vista would fail to boot properly. I’d get to the log in screen, put in my password, and then it’d just show an empty desktop with no picture, icons, start menu, task bar… nothing! Even using the Vista installation DVD to repair the installation failed.

In the end I had to do something I wasn’t too happy with… reinstall Vista. So I did that, reinstalled all my applications and the service pack and get it all set up the way I wanted it, then I got rid of the old partition and tidied them up. Everything’s the way I wanted it to be now.

What took the most time though was figuring out why my Adobe suite wouldn’t install. For about a day and a half I was frustrated at it saying it installed the shared components but not the actual applications themselves (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash etc). I found out eventually that it was because I’d installed the Flash 9 browser plug-in before I installed the suite. In the end, I had to completely rid the computer of anything Adobe-esque before it would install. This included:

  • Using the Adobe Suite cleaner to remove the shared components.
  • Using the Adobe Flash remover to remove the Flash files.
  • Using the Windows Install Clean Up application to remove files left over from the attempted installations.
  • Deleting both Adobe folders and their contents from the Program Files and Common Files folders.
  • Searching the registry and removing anything with Adobe, Macromedia, Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop, Bridge, and Acrobat associated with it.

It was one hell of a battle, but everything is set up the way it should and the computer is a little faster for it. I want to say it’s because of the Service Pack, but it could very well be because it’s a fresh installation. Also, the two things I’d like to see fixed from the last post do appear to have been resolved for now as well. Again, this could be because of a fresh install.

I know this post is a little longer than usual, but I really went through a lot of trouble to get this to work and I wanted SOME record of my achievement somewhere.

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