Released To Manufacturing, but unable to install
- Image by Dekuwa via Flickr
It was time to finally install Windows 7. Released To Manufacturing version. I must admit, I was quite skeptical about this because it seems that I have been cursed in my youth and Microsoft products simply fail with me. No, seriously, I have had so many issues with Windows that even Chuck Norris can’t count all of them, and he counted to infinity, twice. I do hope that you are not affected by the same curse.
So why Windows 7 if nothing works for me like it should? Windows 7 was, and still is praised by a lot of fans. It is even praised by some people that are not, you know, typical fan-boys. I wanted to see what this praise was all about and what is so great on Windows 7. I already had Release Candidate 1 downloaded but I decided to obtain Ready To Manufacture version, they said that it is the shit.
First I made backup of existing Windows Vista partition. I had it installed on first partition on the first hard drive and I have few hundred GB free on my Backup drive, so all I did was:
$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/Backup/Vista.img bs=4096
Yes, this is all you need to do, to get a working (and mountable) image of your hard disk partition. If you’re using Linux or some other unix-like operating system that has the dd command.
After a reboot and a long wait1 at the Starting Windows screen I was able to proceed with installation. Unfortunately it seems that the curse is still on me. Installation stopped before it even started. I wasn’t able to install Windows 7, why? I had no idea at the time, take a look at the screen shot.
Why on earth?
What did I do? I wanted to install on existing partition and Windows 7 told me that old files will be moved to some other place. Not good enough since I wanted them to disappear. I formatted the partition and tried to install. I failed. Then, I deleted the partition and again tried to install, and again failed. There was no way to install Windows 7. Repartitioning the whole disk was out of the question2.
Deleting didn't help.
What’s next? First a reboot, maybe installer will change its mind after new partition was created. It didn’t. Then I went into Repair Mode. Windows 7 installation gives you an option to repair broken Windows 7 installations. I was wondering how this would apply to me since I had no installation and there was nothing to repair. However, I was able to run console and consult with the diskpart program about disk setup. I was happy. I deleted the partition, created new one and formatted it, all in commad line.
It didn’t help. I wasn’t able to install. The story of Windows 7 seemed to be coming to a grinding halt, sad story without they lived happily ever after ending. Then I remembered to take a look at the BIOS settings. It appeard that I had my first SATA hard disk marked as my second hard disk. I have two equally the same 320 GB hard disks for system installations. One hosted Vista and OS X, the other one hosted Linux and their order in BIOS was reversed. I have no idea why, but I’m sure I had a good reason to do this. Not so long ago Ubuntu 9.0.4 installed without any problems on this configuration.
I put the drives in normal order and I was able to install. Couple of reboots later I was stuck again. Installation stoppped at the “Completing the installation …”3 and wouldn’t continue. This was a little easier to resolve. I ejected the DVD and installation continued with a reboot. After the reboot I was back in Business, err, Ultimate. ;)
Windows 7 did install quite quickly not counting all the trouble that I had to go through to get it to work. I am sure that the big dinosaur in Redmond called Microsoft has this big switchboard with a bazillion lights on it, some sort of the blinkenlights machine, and each time someone installs Windows the light gets turned on, so I made them happy for a while. However my first search term in Bling when I opened Internet Explorer 8 was Firefox … Then it was Pidgin, then Thunderbird, then X-Chat, …
I did noticed few annoyances in Windows 7 already:
- Dragging window by its title bar and hitting top of the screen will draw an outline of a maximized window, releasing mouse button at this point will maximize the window. I hit this feature at least five times in less than an hour. Keep in mind that I really dislike maximized windows. I dislike them so much that I remove Maximize buttons when using KDE.
- Firefox 3.5 is always bitching about starting in safe mode. I have no idea why. So far I have installed only Adobe Flash plug-in4.
- Righ clicking on pinned icon in task bar doesn’t bring the old right click menu. You only get options to run the program and to unpin the icon. What about finding the source executable?
- Icons on task bar now represent running programs too. If icon is lit/turned on this program is aready running. By clicking on the icon, program is maximized or brought to the front. Want to run another instance? Right click on the icon and select first option. Quite annoying for someone that wants to open six or seven putty terminal emulators.
- Task bar is bloody huge when un-grouping applications and trying to get the old look back, using small icons helps a little.
- When un-grouped, currently running applications are mixed with icons of non running applications the whole task bar looks rather messed up. Clearly Microsoft would like me to believe that their new task bar works better in the grouped mode and this is how I should use it.
- Switching between regional settings and keyboard layouts is weird! Coming from a country that needs its own keyboard layout and regional settings, this is highly annoying. When I start putty my settings are SL with US Keyboard, when I start Firefox, settings are SL with Slovenian keyboard. Pressing Left-Alt + Left-Shift to change keyboard layout in putty just switches to EN setting with US keyboard. When running Putty, I settings are SL with US Keyboard and LALT+SHIFT change to EN with US keyboard. Which is, keyboard-wise the same. I have to switch keyboard manually if I want Slovenian keyboard. And I can’t remove US keyboard from Slovenian language settings. Update: This appeared to be PEBKAC. The whole problem would go away sooner if LALT+SHIFT could be used for switching different keyboards for one locale settings.
- Pressing Print Screen or Alt+Print-Screen still does nothing useful. It just copies current screen or currently selected window to clipboard. It is really annoying to run Paintbrush5, re-size the default image, paste the content and save, if you want a screen shot.
- Regarding previous post, ALT-F2 or CTRL-SPACE does nothing. In some other operating systems it brings up the quick-run tool where you enter a name of the program you wish to run. Now you have to click Windows button and click on search, type pbrush and press enter.
- TrueCrypt told me that it doesn’t work like it should on Windows 7. So far no problems. I mounted the volume, but didn’t try to use it yet.
- Time management. When, oh When will Microsoft realize that system hardware time needs to be on UTC! Always! Now, if I let windows manage my daylight savings time setting, they will set my hardware clock to UTC+2 to compensate for daylight saving, when I boot to Linux which handles time as it should, my time will be off by couple of hours. If I don’t let them set my DST then applications that depend on time will be screwed up. Twhirl for example.
Is Windows 7 ready for manufacturing? Microsoft says it is. So far I think it is just Vista upgrade and that they could do better at those more specific and advanced tasks. How do I remove Maximize button and how do I select thickness of window frames or remove them completely?
Later today, I will be installing some games …
Update: RTM is of course Released To Manufacturing not Ready To Manufacture.
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- I blamed badly burned DVD for this, altho it was burned with only 4x speed and it should in theory work like a charm, maybe my DVD drive is broken [↩]
- And it wouldn’t help anyway, you’ll see why [↩]
- Or some similar line … [↩]
- Apparently I dragged wrong icon in the task bar. I fail. PEBKAC [↩]
- Which got revamped with ribbons [↩]
So far I had exactly two problems with Windows 7:
– had a problem with AVG antivirus so I run without antivirus software atm;
– Adobe Flash Player has some sort of a problem with Windows 7 and randomly crashes the entire OS! Fixed that one by using Google Chrome because it doesn’t let a stray plugin go wild like IE8 does…
Other than that smooth sailing and thumbs up.
re multiple putties – a shift-click on the icon starts a new instance
I picked one linux install cd then delete&create&format partition and install windows OS finally.
[...] did not have any problems with Windows 7 installation2. Previous undertakings of BigWhale convinced me to remove all partitions from the disk and create one 150GB partition3 of [...]
[...] so long ago BigWhale wrote about Windows 7 RTM. Sure Windows 7 have some installation quirks, but which operating system does not have one or two [...]