Sunday, April 13, 2008

Upgrade to Vista SP1? Not if you dual boot you don't.

Here's your weekly public service announcement: That sucking noise you hear is from Redmond, where Microsoft engineers have short-sighted the implementation of SP1 for Vista [apcmag].

One of those necessary bug swats in the service pack does an integrity check that rummages around the bootloader. If your bootloader has been replaced, i.e. with a Linux dual boot that uses Grub, then Vista SP1 will fail its integrity check and the service pack will not proceed. So, If you’re dualbooting Windows Vista Enterprise or Ultimate alongside a Linux distro, and have installed the Linux bootloader into the MBR, then you’re guaranteed to run into problems when installing Vista Service Pack 1

Thanks, Microsoft. Thanks for nothing. Some people really get a kick out of the new graphical interface, but the rest of us can't run it on our machines without a hardware upgrade. I'm not running Vista. I nearly experimented with it, toying with the fun of learning the pitfalls versus the frustration of climbing back out of them, and it would have been in a dual-boot configuration.

I'm glad I went Linux instead.

2 comments:

Nelson said...

You should know that Microsoft hates Linux, and will do nothing to help them or their legions of fans.

Timothy Pontious said...

Exactly.

May the fleas of a million botnets infest their infrastructure.