Install to Upgrade
I started working on our HTPC this afternoon, and once I got back from Fry’s with a new SATA hard drive so that I could eliminate the IDE cable and get some semi-respectable cable management going on, I started installing Vista. The install went smoothly, the desktop came up (although in ugly 640×480 overscanned on our HDTV), and I then went onto upgrading to Vista. Wait, what? Yeah, there’s a loophole in upgrade copies of Vista where you can do an install on a clean drive by first installing Vista without providing the product key and then do an upgrade from inside of the newly installed Vista. I didn’t make the rules, but it works.
So, the second install (or “upgrade” if you will) finished, and I then started to install drivers. First on the list was the graphics driver so that I could get a better resolution and actually see my whole desktop. Install, reboot… and explode. For some reason the computer now is quite confused on what to do and won’t boot into Vista, so I’m probably going to pull out an old monitor and hook it up so that I can actually see everything that is going on. Good thing this can be my weekend project without anything else getting in the way, I guess.