This is how I am installing Windows Vista x64 with Visual C++ Express 2008 on an NForce 590 SLI board.
1. Open PC case, remove 2 GB of RAM. Otherwise Setup will bluescreen in the final stage because some ’storport.sys’ driver can’t cope with 4 GB of RAM.
2. Install Windows Vista
3. Download and apply KB929777. When KB929777 wants to reboot, do it - but turn off the PC at the BIOS screen.
4. Reinstall the removed 2 GB of RAM and close the case again
5. Let Windows Vista download all available updates. Take care not to install any drivers, especially not the NVidia nForce drivers and very especially not the MediaShield storage driver. Otherwise Windows will hang for 20-30 seconds every so often and the Event Log would show a bus reset event due to a timeout.
6. Start regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices\ and rename ‘D:’ to ‘H:’ - I don’t want my XP partition to be drive D: and windows doesn’t allow me to perform this simple change even though my Windows XP partition is clearly not a locked system partition while I’m running Windows Vista.
6. Install Daemon Tools, mount the Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions ISO, but don’t install Visual C++ 2008 Express first. Otherwise, it would install for 30 minutes and than crash setup.exe (”setup.exe has stopped working and needs to be closed. blablabla”), failing the install.
7. Browse to the .NET Framework 3.5 installer in the Visual C# 2008 Express folder on the VS2008 EE DVD and run it manually. The one in the Visual C++ 2008 Express folder is broken and the reason for the crash in step 6.
8. Reboot and install Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition. This time it will work.
9. Make an image of the Vista partition using Acronis True Image Home. Make sure you don’t have any dynamic disks in your setup because they would be silently deleted by the time you see the Acronis startup screen.
10a. If I’m feeling lucky, try installing sound card drivers for my Audigy 2. The built-in drivers only generate a very low volume and sound like crap. The official Creative Labs drivers sound like louder crap and come with the Creative Audio Console, which allows you to make sound even worse by selecting the ‘Headphones’ option. To obtain recent drivers, google for “No More Goat Soup” and download those drivers. They have been built from the X-Fi drivers in a frankensteinian way. They will completely fix the volume issue and sound great, but cause a bluescreen every other hour
10b. If I’m feeling masochistic, install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. Upon the next reboot, any any kind of networking will be gone for good. No internet, no home network, nothing. Attempting to fix this once it occurred will freeze the system. This happens on all variants of the NForce4 and NForce5 chipset.
10c. For good fun, install the .NET Framework 3.5 from the VCExpress folder on the Visual Studio 2008 Express DVD. It is broken. Either install another Visual Studio Language first, or manually follow the steps in paragraph 7 using the VCSExpress folder.
Time taken to do a clean install of Windows Vista: 1 Week, 2 Days+.
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