James Moody: Geek in Paradise

Yesterday’s Vista Upgrade that I performed definitely didn’t go the way I intended, so I wanted to round my observations up into a more concise format.

1. Best Practices are the best! I covered my love for Best Practices in an earlier post and following the Upgrade Best Practices saved my bacon in this instance. They may seem like extra steps that are a waste of time, but the instances where they save you make it well worth the little bit of time spent on them.
2. If you’re performing work for a client, don’t freak when bad things happen. If you’re confident in your abilities as a technician and things go awry, calmly let your client immediately know what happened and detail the process you’ll be taking to turn it into a happy ending. A detailed explanation can do wonders for client confidence.
3. Keep the client informed as you hit milestones in your recovery process. Keeping my client informed of when I got a second backup really eased his worries alot. When I called him to inform him of getting back to the desktop, he was ecstatic. It makes it easier when the client is confident in your abilities to start with, but pulling out a win will cement that forever. With new clients, I would give them more frequent updates just to reassure them that their problem has your full, undivided attention.
4. When performing something as touch and go as an upgrade, let the software do it’s job. I’m 99% certain the corruption of the hard drive was caused by an application uninstall of Acrobat that hung while the Advisor Disc was doing it’s thing. I had started the uninstall of Reader 7 while I had multiple folder windows open from copying data. While recalling the events that happened, I remembered seeing it in the taskbar before the machine shutdown. Next upgrade I perform, I am going to always close every window before starting any “Vendor Upgrade Discs” to minimize that type of failure. Learn from your mistakes!
5. A final word of advice on upgrades. Uninstall anything before the upgrade process that you think you’ll end up uninstalling later. Don’t wait until the client gets to see their shiny new Vista. This bit me in the ass on this one, and I won’t be repeating it anytime soon. I’ve already laid out a document for my own use from this experience to follow when performing upgrades, as they seem to be way more finicky than a clean install. I fully expect I won’t be having any more Upgrade issues, so I can rub it in to those that say it’s undoable.

I hope this and the Vista Upgrade article will help at least 1 techie perform a successful upgrade without any hassles.

(Due to the popularity of this article in the Search Engines, if you came here looking for advice before Upgrading Vista, feel free to check out my Vista Upgrade Process article, which details best practices for a successful upgrade.)

Today, I’m performing my first Vista upgrade for a client. As a public service, I’m going to chronicle this process that so many have criticized.

I’ve done several Vista Clean installs and have yet to run into anything showstopping. A quick update or 2 and all is well, so we’ll see how the Upgrade process goes.

I’m doing the Vista Upgrade on a Compaq SR2020NX running Windows Media Center. It has a “Vista Capable” sticker, and Compaq supplied the client with a Vista Home Premium DVD and a CD with the updated drivers for the machine. He received the Home Premium Upgrade for free, so it looks like HP isn’t gouging the Upgrade. Good on them.

First things first. Backing up data. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say, mission accomplished painlessly. After backing up data, I uninstalled some of the Compaq bloat software packages, ran a defrag of the hard drive to prepare the drive for the upgrade process, and burned a Recovery CD set (just in case!). Most machines of today don’t supply you with a recovery CD/DVD set and expect you to make your own. At least they give you a program that takes care of that.

All necessary program/driver updates for the machine have been downloaded and waiting on an external hard drive for the process to complete.

Starting the upgrade process now, check back for an update shortly! (Scratch that, more data to backup, iTunes folder, ouch)

HP supplies a “HP Upgrade Assistant” DVD along with the Windows Vista DVD, and recommended to be run first. Upon running, it went through and uninstalled some programs. Which ones, I don’t know, as it was just a window with a scroll animation that informed me it was uninstalling programs. It does have a handy checklist before upgrading. Things like Backup, defrag, BIOS updates, Recovery CD creation, etc. I had done research prior to getting onsite, so I was able to click through.

After the HP Advisor was done, I was prompted to insert the Windows Vista Disc. Vista did it’s compatibility check and informed me of several programs that I was likely to have issues with. I guess the HP Assistant Disc didn’t do so hot in removing troublesome programs.

1 hour after popping in the HP Advisor disc, I was staring at the Vista Desktop. I was greeted with a prompt to install a unknown driver. I told it go check online, and it grabbed and installed the Intel Quick Resume Driver. Spiffy. While I was grabbing the driver, the OS had already downloaded and installed 5 critical updates and prompted me of the fact. I popped in the HP Advisor Disc again and it began installing Vista compliant drivers and software. Very nice of HP to send that along with the Upgrade disc, however, it does take quite a bit of time to run (~20 minutes or so).

iTunes required a Repair from the Control Panel to get back to working status.

And disaster strikes…

As the HP Advisor disc was in the process of finishing, the machine froze solid. After giving it 5 minutes of no disk activity, I reset the machine to be greeted by a lovely blinking cursor. I put the Vista disc in and booted into a repair installation, where I ran the Repair tool. My hunch was proved correct when it returned a corrupted MBR, which it had fixed. Thinking all was well, I rebooted to be greeted with a black screen (no blinking cursor). Well, there’s something more going on so I rebooted into the repair tool and let it do it’s thing. This time, it found a Corrupted Partition table which it then said it repaired. Awesome! Next reboot was greeted by the same black screen, so I figured the other partition was corrupt as well and let the repair tool run again and fix the partition table again. Reboot, same thing…

At this point, I decided to check out similar instances on the web and came across an article on the Repair Tool itself. In the article, by Microsoft, it stated that the repair tool would fix MBR and Partition Table corruption EXCEPT corruption caused by an XP to Vista Upgrade. This must be the Mother of all Partition Table corruptions.

I’m now in the process of trying to recover partition information using a 3rd party tool and hopefully salvaging the data (as a second backup just in case, we had already backed everything up).

After I ran into the corrupted MBR, I called an associate of mine in the business and he said every Vista Upgrade he had done so far from a big vendor had resulted in failure. An upgrade from a fresh install of XP has resulted in success every time, but every time it’s an upgrade from a brand name system with the Express Upgrade, it’s failed. So, from mine and my associate’s experiences, the Brand name vendors have a long way to go on their “Upgrade Discs”. Warning bells should have went off when the Vista Compatibility pointed out those programs with potential problems, but that’s my fault for believing the big vendors actually got a tool right. No more~

More to come~

4 hours later, the 3rd party tool rebuilt the partition table enough to pull all the data as a 2nd backup. I stuck the drive back into the system and booted it up for giggles. It got stuck on the partition again, so for one last hurrah, I let the Vista Repair Tool do it’s Partition repair one last time. Reported as fixed. Yeah, right. Rebooted and…

We’re on the Desktop again! In the process now of running the HP Advisor Disc again. I got to thinking of the exact sequence of events that happened when it locked up, and I don’t think it was the HP Disc, but we shall see. If my suspicions are confirmed, I’ll let anyone reading know.

As a final update, the system completed the Advisor Disc successfully and the machine is running perfect at the client’s home. I’m working on a follow-up post to kind of summarize the entire process and let you in on where the upgrade went south.