…and Lothar thought that he was having a bad day…

[color=orange]About a month ago the office PC I was using as my “ultra safe” business PC began to slowly exhibit weird behavior and eventually failed to boot any longer (circa 2002 mobo with bulging/leaking capacitor issues).  Fortunately all important data and profiles were saved prior to the lockout to an external HDD so no heartache in that respect.  As I was scouting out new parts for the office PC redux I thought to myself; “self, HTPC V2.0 has that goofy stuttering problem when trying to watch a hi-def DVD launched from VMC.  So why not buy a nice Phenom quad core and upgrade the RAM for HTPC V2.0 and donate the X2 4800+ to the office PC redux project in an effort to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak?”…brilliant!…I thought to myself.

So I place an order with NewEgg and patiently waited for the arrival of all of the goodies. 

Finally all of the goods arrived and the projects could begin.

The upgrade from HTPC V2.0 to V2.1 was seemingly a success but with some anomalies.  First Vista would not start from a restart; it would only start from a complete shutdown and subsequent cold start.  Secondly VMC would not recognize the PVR-250 capture card; VMC simply hung up on me whenever I tried to set up the source even though all hardware and drivers appeared to be OK.  Third, Boxee for Windows was inconsistent in its video quality depending on the selected video source (I don’t believe that this was related to the hardware swap though I just thought that I’d mention that I was selected to be an alpha tester).  Fourth, HD disc playback from VMC was still choppy even with the Phenom and new RAM although when launched from the desktop all was smooth as silk just as before…aaaarrrrggghhh!

At this point I decided that I would quit being so stubborn and finally perform a fresh reinstall of Vista so that this darn thing would finally function as it always should have (and thus upgrading the HTPC version number to V2.1.1 in the process).

After nine hours and numerous attempts to reinstall Vista I am completely locked out of HTPC V2.1.X.  I either get a; “This computer’s hardware may not support booting to this disk.  Ensure that…” message or the “Windows failed to start.  A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:” message or error 0x80004005.  It’s a vicious circle.  I tried reformatting the HDD with an old XP disc hoping that Vista wouldn’t recognize the old files.  I even installed Kubuntu 8.10 in an attempt to “cleanse” the HDD and I still get the same error messages when I try to install Vista.  Solutions found by Googling the error messages leads to a repair attempt but this leads to a dead end as well along with the same series of error messages.  Again, I’m just going in circles here. 

All of the hardware is less than a year old so that shouldn’t be a factor (not to mention that I had a functioning PC, albeit with some hiccups, after the upgrade).  My next move is to install one of my old HDDs into HTPC V2.1.X and try to install and boot Vista from there.  If that doesn’t work there’ll be a smashed up PC in my driveway some time tomorrow afternoon.

Just venting, thanks for reading along  🙂

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