I’m writing to you from my laptop, dear reader, as my PC is a steaming slag heap on the floor here. Long story short: It’s too soon to be using Vista. I knew that one of these days, the “Warnings” would actually be accurate and I’d fry something. Fry something I did! Best to wait for RTM to officially come out in a few months. When the vendors have a chance to issue their updates, etc.
Summary: Don’t ever, ever use Ghost 2003 with Vista. There is a warning when installing (as usual) it, but since all I wanted to do was restore I didn’t think Vista would even know about it (Ghost runs in PC-DOS after a reboot). The thing is, which I utterly forgot, Vista installs a new boot loader. Somewhere (and this is the only thing I can think) between the Vista boot loader and Ghost’s boot command lay hell in waiting. Ghost booted as I would expect, and then hung on startup. Before it hung, however, it rewired my hard drives to an unusable point. There is, indeed, an “incompatibility”.
The only way out of this was to completely reformat my C drive (NOT using Quick), reload XP, and then force-remount my storage drive. This got me out of the weeds last nite at midnite. Now I get to re-install everything 
. Even now, though, I don’t trust my hard drives – who knows what happened in there…
…And Why Did I Try To Reimage?
IE7 had the habit of crashing on me routinely, and then going completely unstable to the point where I couldn’t use it anymore. Not sure what the culprit was, but I would be browsing a page, click a link and then IE would go catatonic. I’d try to quit it but it wouldn’t let me ( I had this happen in XP too, to be fair). Finally I resorted to a forced shutdown (C+A+D) and it would close. But every instance of IE thereafter would do the same thing.
I decided to let Vista try to “Collect Information” about the crash and send it to MS for me; anything to help. The interesting thing is that when I did this – the entire screen “grayed” out as Vista likes to do – essentially locking the experience in a modal way so you can’t interact with anything. It does this whenever you install software and then it asks you “is this OK?”. I really hate that but i understand it’s MS’s attempt to be more secure.
Anyway, the collection agent locked me out and decided to hang itself! Nice “feature’, so all i could do was a power cycle (who knows, maybe this caused my issue).
I have a general rule of thumb – if i have to reboot more than 3 times in one day from instability, then I need to re-image. I lost a lot of time and work yesterday so I decided enough was enough. I’ll try Vista again in 2 months.
Before I reloaded XP, I decided to snap an image of Vista so I could just reload it. I installed Ghost, got the familiar and now-ignorable warning, and setup for the image. Windows restarted and I lost everything as Ghost hung on startup.
I am sure that there are others out there getting along fine with Vista. I don’t mean to complain but…. well I can’t be the only one having issues. If you have Vista and want to share – please do. More importantly, if you’ve used Ghost with Vista successfully – do share. I’ve used it for years now and it works great, and I would be encouraged to know if the hang was a hardware issue or incompatibility.
For now, my Vista experience is finished.
