[update: Jun 9 2007] Amazing to me that this is still one of the most popular posts here. Meanwhile time has rolled on to Vista for the Windows masochists, and newer versions of OS X and new distros of Linux: Ubuntu seems to the way to go for people who just want to get stuff done. I’m re-opening comments on this just to see if anything useful gets added to the thread.
[update: Oct 11, 2007] The old saying “if I had a dime for every time” is apropos of this post and thread: 2600 dimes would be handy đŸ˜‰
I burned my Windows XP CD today (actually, I burned two since the first didn’t seem to work). I then proceeded to install XP over my WIN2K installation.
I’m pretty sure most of the Windows fans I hear from have never installed it from scratch: what an abysmal installer. White on blue ASCII DOS text: yeagch. Contrast it with OS X’s installer or even Redhat’s, if you like.
And that was the best of it. It proceeded to copy all its bits and pieces to the disk, make the windows partition active (de-activating my BSD partition), and then reboot. Only then do I discover some file in “d:\i386\asms” can’t be located and we’re stuck. Bad CD? I don’t know: both of them give the same error. I assume the image is OK, since it should have been checksummed when it was downloaded. And of course w/o a windows installation, I can’t fetch it again.
I think FreeBSD supports some kind of mounting of ISO images as filesystems. If so I can perhaps see what’s missing, if anything.
UPDATE: mounting ISOs is a snap thanks to this page.
I’m not what the discrepancy here is from: perhaps this is the wrong way to look at this.
[/cdrom]# du -sk ~/WinXP_Pro.ISO .
500592 /home/paul/WinXP_Pro.ISO
494745 .
The sad thing about this is that I have the WINxp volume mounted in FreeBSD: if I only knew what was missing and where to put it, I’d be home free. Perhaps in a day I’ll take another whack at it. The swelling should have gone down by then.
[update Aug 25, 2007] Interesting that all of MSFT’s authentication servers are down, meaning all affected installs of those OSes are marked as counterfeit. I can only imagine what that means for whoever has the job of enforcing those agreements. DRM: defective by design is about right, I would say.