Frank's Blog

Okay, as mentioned in this post I’m suspecting a broken harddisc or even more. Curious as I am I got a new harddisc (2.5 inch, SATA, 250GB, 56.- Euros) and replaced the old (broken?) one.
I also organized a Windows Vista install cd (the sticker on the bottom with the number was kindda readable). Prepared to install a fresh system I started from the cd drive – well, I tried to. The device just didn’t find anything to boot from. Hm, broken cd, I thought. To be sure I created a new virtual machine with Parallels and tried to install from the Vista cd – without any problem. Something wrong with SATA bus ?

Going on, I put the cd content on a usb memory stick to boot from it. This was done rather simple with this command on a Windows machine:

xcopy D:\*.* E: /s/e/f

Where “D” is the cd drive, “E” the mounted usb memory stick.
Selecting the stick as boot device (pressing “F12″ on the Thinkpad welcome screen gives a boot menu to choose from available devices) a Windows Vista installer came up, finally. I started the installation and ran into the next problem. The installer didn’t want to install on the harddisc because of:

Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation

Googling around led me to Microsoft Support which wasn’t that useful. Within the installation system I was perfectly able to get access to the disc via command prompt (pressing SHIFT+F10 opens a “DOS box”) and do tasks with diskpart.
So, what do I do normally when I expect hardware errors ? I use a Linux distribution to see if the error persists. I connected my pimped Billix usb stick and started a network installation of Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 – without any problem!
And btw: It worked like a charm.

I placed the Vista install cd in the cd tray but Ubuntu neither mounted it automatically nor manually:

Unable to mount location, No media in the drive

Surely there is just a little trick I don’t know to install Vista without problems but as I’m used to use Macs and PCs with Linux I have to do it the hard way :-/ .
I restarted with the basics, pressing the “ThinkVantage” button on startup I went into the BIOS and set the SATA mode to “compatibility”. But installation failed again. I started the HDD diagnostic program of the BIOS which passed without errors.
Could the installation problem be caused by the usb stick ?
Is the dvd drive defect ?

That I’ll try to make clear next time

To be continued…