Hey y'all... anyone out there?

I've been playing Shaun White Snowboarding, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, DiRT, Fallout 3, Castle Crashers, Mirror's Edge, NHL 09 and a bit of Rock Band 2 (with the AC/DC track pack!). So many games, so little time. I've even been thinking about starting a new campaign in Neverwinter Nights 2, for some reason.

SW Snowboarding is kinda fun, looks great, but sometimes doesn't have very good physics. The mountains are HUGE. Best part of the game is just riding them any way you like. However, you can slam into a tree at top speed and just bounce off of it and keep going. It is a lot of fun do tricks on the way-too-overly-abundant park features (the entire mountain seems like one big terrain park), and the competitions thing with other LIVE users is neat. I don't think this game will have real lasting value though, which is why I only rented it. Only reason I think I'll play it is because I love snowboarding. Anyone else, forget about it. Perhaps I'll buy it later when I can get a cheap copy, for like $10 or something.

I think playing Marvel UA has got me in the mood for a good RPG. It's fun, has good visual effects and, surprisingly, good controls even though it's a console RPG. Playing three players on a single console is a lot of fun, but also a bit frustrating at times, since the game needs to keep all three of you on the screen at the same time. It does have the all-too-familiar RPG formula, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's nothing new either. The story seems to touch on every facet of the Marvel universe (hence the title?) but I couldn't care less about that since I'm not a comics guy, and I'm not really paying attention to it at all. It's a dungeon-crawler for me!

Fallout 3 is also an RPG, but of the FPS variety. It's got such a great visual design and the character building system is really cool. Only about five hours into it though so I can't comment too deeply on it. So far so good. Graphics on the PC are excellent, with HDR lighting and nice shadowing, detailed textures, anti-aliasing. Voice actors are competent in most cases. The huge number of weapons, skills, perks, and ways to build out your character is something else. I'm going for a smart, charismatic computer nerd (i know, highly unlikely!) who tries to talk or hack his way into and out of everything, and when that fails, a good blast from an energy weapon (yet to be found) with a high critical strike percentage should do the trick.

Castle Crashers is just fun, not much more to say about it than that. A simple, entertaining way to play multiplayer on a single console for cheap.

DiRT is cool. Awesome graphics, decent controls, excellent 3D menu system, and terrible voice acting during races (voices in the menus are good though). You have lots of beautiful cars to unlock, lots of gorgeous tracks/environmens to race on, and a large variety of race types to keep things interesting. I'm not a big racing fan, but I've always liked off-road racing to some extent, with my R/C buggy history as a kid. I kinda miss my RC10...

Mirror's Edge is not as good as I'd hoped. It's different, for sure. Almost a new genre of game, but still based on FPS. Maybe it can be called a "concept game". I like that you are encouraged to avoid fighting as much as possible, and get away by running and using all the available obstacles to your advantage. The story is a little weak, and after a while, even the unique visual design feels repetitive and too stark. I think with the trimmed down graphics, they could have added more special effects and even better textures with those spare CPU and GPU cycles. This game needs more variety in the single-player story. Granted, I haven't tried the time trials and multiplayer aspects so maybe those are interesting. I'll probably just end up selling this back to EB, as I don't think it represents lasting value to me.

So what have you been up to? Craving some multiplayer NWN2? Let me know!

That's right, you heard me: I won't be buying Gears of War 2. No way, no sirree, will I play a first person shooter (Gears is close enough to quality as an FPS) on a console until keyboard and mouse controllers are available, and let's face it, that ain't gonna happen any time soon!

Epic announced at the end of August that there would not be a release of Gears 2 for the PC platform--a huge disappointment! While it did take a full year for a PC version of the original Gears of War, it was, in my opinion, well worth the wait, as the graphics and visual effects of the game were absolutely stunning, even a year later. I was very happy to go out and pay full price for a year-old game, because it was that good, and I played it through to the end twice (single player, then multiplayer co-op).

However, with the announcement that there will be no Gears 2 for PC, Epic has lost a paying customer in me, and I'm confident that I'm not the only one who finds using a gamepad for an FPS to be cumbersome at best, and absolutely frustrating at worst.

Furthermore, I take exception to a recent statement by Gears lead developer Cliff Bleszinski during an interview with TVG:

"Here's the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know bit torrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software."

CliffyB (yeah, I called him that, tough!) effectively groups hard-working, intelligent consumers who pay good money for their gaming rigs to play the best games--which they purchase legally--with unscrupulous, downloading pirates who don't care about the future of PC gaming, or the law for that matter. Well, I happen to take offense to that, and I seriously hope Mr. Bleszinski retracts or apologizes for this unfair generalization in the near future, or risk a boycott of all of his games! As if using GameSpy to power the multiplayer in Unreal Tournament III wasn't bad enough!

Besides all that, with my limited time, there are several other games to keep me occupied this fall/winter season, such as Far Cry 2, Call of Duty: World at War, Crysis Warhead, NHL 09, Mirror's Edge, Rock Band 2, and more. I think Epic made a big mistake with this decision, and I won't be paying $70 to settle for a second-rate FPS experience using a gamepad on my Xbox 360.

Yep, you heard it correctly, Steam now works properly on my PC. After weeks, if not months, of trying to get it to work, I finally came across an online forum post that helped. If you are having trouble with Steam in Windows Vista working very slowly, failing to install a game (game cache files), failing to login / authenticate, you should give this fix a try.

You simply open a command prompt with Administrator privileges, and run the following command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

For more information, view the original post with details about how to open the "elevated" command prompt, and how to reverse this command should you have any trouble. After running this command on my system, I was able to install Steam, login, and install The Orange Box, without any trouble whatsoever. Everything was fast and smooth, as should be expected.

I hope this can save somebody from spending hours or days, frustrated out of their minds, trying to make Steam work smoothly on their Vista PC.

Valve, for their part, did attempt to help me via their support website, but as I've documented previously, their efforts were, for the most part, meagre, if not downright insulting at times. They simply regurgitate the information already available on the support website FAQs/knowledge base, and ask you the same questions over and over. A pity that they didn't recommend this solution during our lengthy conversation.

They tried to blame me a number of times for not doing things the way they say to, for setting up my router incorrectly, for having firewalls and other software that interferes with Steam, when in fact, the issue is a simple Windows Vista TCP stack problem. Not even a problem, really, but an incompatible "feature" (whch, in my opinion, might as well be a bug).

In any case, I can now play The Orange Box, have almost finished Half Life 2: Episode 1, and might get into a little Team Fortress 2 if I have the time. Unfortunately it's a bit too late, since the next barrage of new game releases starts next month (September) and I probably won't have much time to go back and play The Orange Box. It's refreshing that TF2 keeps getting updated, though, so we'll see if I can squeeze in a little bit of that, and hopefully complete Half Life 2: Episode 2.

If you haven't checked it out already, you should definately check out Ninja Gaiden II. It's got an arcade feel, as it should considering it's origins, but with cool graphics, great ninja tactics, and about a thousand different weapon combinations ("techniques") to keep you coming back for more. It's also great because you can play for about 15 minutes, reach a save point, and put it down and come back later. You don't have to spend hours in front of the game just to get into it (although you probably will anyway!).

So far my favourite weapons are the hand and foot claws ("Falcon's Talons") and the dual katanas ("Dragon's Claw and Tiger's Fang"). The massive "Eclipse Scythe" is also very useful for larger oponents and bosses, and the "Vigoorian Flail" seems fun and pretty effective but I haven't used it much.

I think that although the developers did a great job of making the game run smoothly, the texture quality and polygon count of the environments is a little lacking, and there isn't much in the way of environmental effects, other than the odd bit of fog here or there. Some of the lighting is very good, and the character models are very nicely detailed, which helps make up for some of the definciancies, but I think the game would be even better if they could have included higher-res textures.

The best part, of course, is the fighting. You'll mame, dismember, mutilate and vanquish thousands of enemies in graphic ninja form, blood spurting everywhere and in pools, body parts scattered all over the place. The action is lightning fast, vicious and totally engaging. Awesome!

The bottom line is that it's a totally fun game to play, with lots of replay value considering all of the different weapons and techniques you can attempt to master. Get it, and try to beat my karma scores online.

I'm still trying to get Steam to work on my PC. I don't know why I haven't given up yet, probably because there's just no good reason why it shouldn't work. If there was some documented bug, or hardware incompatibility, router problem, whatever... maybe then I could just accept it and move on. However, the problem is, it does work, just not under Windows Vista on my PC.

LGX loaned me a spare hard disk to put into my PC and install Windows XP on. I did so, and the first time I fired up The Orange Box installer, it worked quickly and flawlessly. Steam installed, updated itself, and I installed Half Life 2 in about 15 minutes. It takes me longer just to log into Steam sometimes under Windows Vista, on the same computer.

So it seems that the problem lies somewhere in the Vista realm. I've tried so many things, though, and nothing has worked.

Other things I've tried:

• Completely uninstalling Steam, deleting Steam directory, and re-installing.
• Running steam.exe in Windows XP compatibility mode
• Running steam.exe "as Administrator"
• Disabling IPv6, QoS, network Discovery, etc.
• Using a different network adapter (wireless this time)
• Updating BIOS, chipset drivers, network adapter driver
• Disabled all startup programs and non-essential services (via msconfig.exe)

Valve support has been virtually useless. The last response took a full week, and they offered up yet another nugget of wisdom: connect my computer directly to my Internet provider (bypass my router). I don't know, but I would think that maybe, just MAYBE, the fact that it works fine on another computer, and even on the same computer (under XP), means that my router is not the problem. I don't have a DSL modem to plug into the wall jack anyway.

The other funny thing about their response this time was that they just now realized I was installing The Orange Box from the retail discs (vs. through Steam via download), when I told them that in the very first post over two weeks ago. Duh.

They also keep regurgitating the same crap over and over: "Check your router settings... disable Windows Firewall... turn off anti-virus... turn off incompatible programs...", all of which I had previously done (and in the case of anti-virus, explained to them twice that I've never installed it). It's like they're not even reading my messages! Or they just don't believe me. Either way, they're pissing me off, and if I don't figure this out soon, it'll be the last "Steam powered" game I ever buy.

Last night I was working on a couple suggestions from Valve support staff to try and get Steam working smoothly on my PC. As I was doing this, I realized that I have another Windows PC on which I could try out Steam, just to see if it would work properly on another computer on my network.

My Macbook has an installation of Windows XP running in a virtual machine under VMware Fusion. It's a pretty bare installation with only a few applications installed, mainly for testing websites on a PC or a couple apps that just aren't available for Mac OS X. So I booted up XP and downloaded Steam from the Valve website. When I started the installation, the familiar "Updating" window appeared and I braced for a long, slow update process that would take a couple of hours. However, the progress bar filled up quickly, and the update was 100% finished in only a couple of minutes!

This is the fastest installation of the Steam client I've ever seen. I've only installed on my gaming/home theatre PC in the past, which is the one currently giving me grief, and it has always been slow, but on my Macbook, it was as fast as you would expect with a 3.5Mbps Internet connection.

Strangely, I have Windows Firewall and AVG Free anti-virus installed and operational on that PC and, still, there were no issues. Those are two of the first things the Valve support staff ask you to disable when troubleshooting.

After installing the client, I fired it up, logged in (in a speedy 3 seconds), and to test the download speeds, began to install the Half Life 2 demo. The download zipped along at 320KB/s, nearly the maximum speed of my 'Net connection. The full download, in the range of 3-4GB, took about an hour or two I think. Amazing, considering I've waited more than an hour just to log into Steam on my PC!

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So it seems that the network (mine and theirs) is not the issue, since my Macbook is plugged into the same network switch as my PC and uses the same router and ISP.

Now, what could be the problem with my PC? I've been following the support staff's requests, by disabling all non-essential services and startup programs, turning off security software, etc. and still I only get 160KB/min download speed. I updated the BIOS on my motherboard, installed the latest motherboard chipset drivers, disabled overclocking, and still no change in speed.

What's next? I'm waiting to hear back from Valve support.

Being as thick-skulled as I am, I tried to install The Orange Box again last night. I knew Steam would be trouble, and this time I tried to figure out what exactly was going on.

As I mentioned previously, the installation of any game through Steam gets stuck at the point where it says "Creating local game cache files...". Others online have had this problem time and again, and some have said that Steam is downloading all of the game updates that have been released since the DVD was pressed. Sure enough, I checked my Windows Performance Monitor and it shows Steam connecting to various servers and using some bandwidth. The problem, however, is how much, or should I say, how little, bandwidth is being used:

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As you can see, Steam is using a mere 150KBpm of bandwidth. That equates to roughly 20kbps, or about 30% slower than an old 28.8kbps modem! WTF is with that? I monitored it for several operations over a period of about 3 hours, and never did Steam rise above 160KBpm of bandwidth usage, no matter which server it was connected to (and it connected to several different ones).

You can also see that my Internet connection is not to blame, because I'm streaming a video (from Gamespot) at over 8MB/min, or just over 1Mbps, which makes sense since the video was encoded at a little less than that rate. Of course, I got the same pitiful bitrate from Steam even when nothing else was using the network (so don't place the blame on other applications saturating my connection). And yes, I've tried deleting the ClientRegistry.blob file, which only served to force Steam to re-update itself and wasting almost two hours of my time.

Another interesting point is that the Steam server that I was connected to most of the time is a mere five network hops away from my PC, one of these including my own router:

I would alternately connect to VALVE1-YYZ and VALVE2-YYZ, which makes sense since Valve themselves list two servers in Toronto on their network status page. Both of them were equally slow, and when I say equally, I mean exactly the same speed: 150-160KBpm. I would also occasionally connect to other Valve servers which seem to be in the U.S., and guess what, nearly the exact same speeds.

So is Valve capping the download speeds from their content servers at 20Kbps? If you search Google you'll see that others get this exact same speed as well, and so it would seem that there is definitely some type of traffic shaping going on, in the range of 20-25Kbps.

If the game requires even 1GB of downloadable updates, then at a speed of 20Kbps that download will take over 110 hours (4.6 days) to complete. This actually coincides with users I've found online who report three- or more day installation times for Steam-powered games. Absolutely ridiculous!

As if the previous post wasn't enough.

After my failed attempt to get Unreal Tournament 3 to stay connected to an online server, I thought I'd try the other problem software that plagued my Windows Vista installation before the re-install: The Orange Box, and thus, it's associated DRM and management software, Steam. For the record, I did get it working once before, for about two weeks, at which point it tried to update itself and never worked again. But I digress.

Let me spell it out for those of you who weren't aware of this already: I hate Steam. I H-A-T-E S-T-E-A-M.

Steam is a software application that acts as a "portal" to your "Steam-powered" games. You launch Steam, and then from within Steam, you launch your game. The reason for this, besides all of the marketing/advertising built into it, is that Steam also acts as a DRM tool for games. Software piracy is obviously a huge concern for game publishers, and Steam is yet another method of trying to reduce said piracy. Lastly, Steam also provides an automatic update route for the games installed within it: the software automatically checks for and downloads any available updates to your games, and then installs them, so you always have the latest version. Sounds good, right?

Well if you've never used Steam before, it doesn't sound so bad. However, when you actually attempt to install it and use it, that goes out the window.

This is the second time I've attempted to install Steam on a clean Vista installation. It is the second time that I've encountered endless problems.

The first time you attempt to install your game, in this case The Orange Box, it will install Steam first. However, when you install Steam, it attempts to update itself right away. This process takes forever. I'm not joking, I've never seen a software update process take so long. I don't know what's wrong with the software or with the Steam network, but why does this little "shell" application that merely hosts your games take hours to update, if it even updates at all? I just don't get it.

At least, this time around, it eventually updated itself (three hours later) and presented a login screen. Since I already had a Steam account from the previous installation, I entered my credentials and pressed the Login button. Then I waited. And waited. And waited some more. Guess what happened next? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Big surprise! The login windows stayed in the following mode for more than an hour:

Since I didn't think it was working properly (or was it? Everything else in Steam takes forever), I hit the Cancel button. The window instantly disappeared and I was left staring at the Windows desktop. What happened to my installation of The Orange Box that I was in the middle of? No sign of it. Where did Steam go? Who knows.

I restarted The Orange Box installation from the DVD, and of course it launched Steam again. This time it, mercifully, did not attempt to update itself, it merely presented me with the login window above. I re-entered my credentials and, hesitantly, pressed the Login button and went over to my Xbox 360 to play some NHL 08 while I waited for some kind of response.

A little more than an hour later I checked the screen and the Login window had finally done something: it disappeared. Where did it go? I was just happy that something, anything, had happened. The Windows system tray showed a new icon for Steam so I clicked it and up came the main Steam interface. Success! At least I thought so.

Steam seemed to finally be working, but where was my installation of The Orange Box? Under the My Games tab, the contents of The Orange Box were all listed as not being installed. So I launched the installer from the DVD yet again, and this time Steam took over and asked me which components I wanted to install. The Orange Box contains five games, including Half Life 2 and its two expansion packs, Portal, and Team Fortress 2, all of which I want to play, so I elected to install everything. It started to install Half Life 2 by coming up with a window that said "Creating local game cache files... Preparing Half Life 2 files for install..." which contained a progress bar. The bar advanced about a third of the way across, then froze. I waited for a while (maybe 30 minutes), and of course nothing happened. I hit the Cancel button. Bad idea.

Steam then disappeared, and it wouldn't come back. I launched it from the desktop icon: nothing. Launched it from The Orange Box installer: nothing. The Windows task list would show "Steam.exe" running, but no window would ever come up, and no system tray icon would appear.

Let me remind you again: I HATE STEAM.

After a reboot, Steam appeared once more, automatically on startup this time, and I logged into it. This time it only took about five minutes before the window disappeared and the system tray icon appeared. Clicking on the system tray icon brought up the main interface and I again attempted to install The Orange Box, but this time I would elect to only install Team Fortress 2. I got the same window as the previous Half Life 2 installation, but this time the progress bar advanced all the way across (after a few more games of NHL 08). Yes! I thought I was finally in business, but then nothing else happened. It sat there:

Believing this was just another case of Steam moving very, very slowly, I left it. Overnight. Well wouldn't you know it, when I checked it again the next morning, it was still sitting there. No more progress. I've since left it on that window, and how much do you want to bet that when I get home from work today, it will still be on that same screen? I'm guessing you won't take me up on that one.

I hate Steam. And I'm not the only one.

I'm really beginning to hate PCs. I can't believe I said that, but it's true.

So after my epic battle to get Windows Vista installed on my PC, things were looking good. Windows Update installed all of the latest service packs, patches, hotfixes, definitions and drivers (58 updates in total). Then I installed the latest Realtek sound and NVidia video drivers, no problems there. My PC was working well, it was fast and responsive, and everything was in perfect order. Time to install the first game on this fresh machine, Unreal Tournament 3.

If you recall from the last post, my problem with UT3 is that I can't stay connected to the server for more than a few minutes. It gives me the following message after a short period of online gameplay:

I was hoping that it was an operating system problem or something, so I thought maybe a fresh Vista install would make it go away. Anyway...

The installation went smoothly, and I installed patch 1.2 as soon as it was done. Fired it up and it was looking good. Just had to remember my damn password, but got it on the third try. Cool thing is, when you log into UT3, it loads all of your preferences, so your keyboard mappings and character profile are all loaded up. Nice! Now for the real test: an online match.

I jumped into a Team Deathmatch game on a Pure server. The skills were a bit rusty, but I kept at least a 1:1 kills-to-death ratio going and helped my team win the match. I was online for between 5-10 minutes without a hiccup, it seemed like the Vista refresh was working after all. I even felt the need to send a message to the other players exclaiming my joy at being able to stay connected to a game longer than any other since UT3 came out back in November.

The second match started shortly after and I stayed in. This time I was rocking at least a 2:1 kills-to-death ratio and was thinking "alright, I'm back!", when suddenly, about 5 minutes into the match--you guessed it--the dreaded "duplicate login" error message came up! WTF?!

A quick search of the official UT3 forums comes up with a new stickied post about the problem, and several older threads. A Google search finds several other forums with users complaining of the same issue. The only official response is: "We are aware of the issue and Gamespy is working on it." Well this problem has been occuring since day 1, so it doesn't seem like Gamespy is working too hard on it.

Of course, people want to blame me, saying it's my firewall or router settings, my Vista network settings, something like that. Well, LGX is sharing my Internet connection, using the same router and very nearly the same computer hardware (although he's on Windows XP and not Vista, which I'm leaning towards placing the blame on), and he has no issues whatsoever. I can turn off my Windows Firewall and it doesn't help. I've even turned off my router firewall settings and that doesn't help.

So that brings us back to my original statement: I'm really beginning to hate PCs. I already ditched the PC as my desktop platform of choice when I bought a Macbook a couple years ago. The Apple hardware is very nicely designed, and Mac OS X is far and away a better operating system than Windows has ever been. I was always a big PC proponent, but in my opinion, when Apple completely rebuilt Mac OS on a UNIX-like foundation, and then moved their hardware to the Intel x86 architecture, they won the war. I've never once regretted getting a Mac for my desktop machine, and I probably won't ever buy a PC for that purpose again, at least until Windows is rebuilt from the ground up.

My servers are all running Slackware Linux. I would never consider running a Windows server at home. Ever. Here are some reasons why. Here are some more.

As for gaming, I bought an Xbox 360 Elite about a month ago, and have been playing games with it offline and online and, even though it is a Microsoft product, never once have I had any problems. It works every single time. It's fast, the games look and play great, and it's cheap compared to a gaming PC. It is a bit on the noisy side (there are some really whiney fans in that thing, and the DVD-ROM is really loud while spinning), but because of the ease of use and stability, it's well worth it.

If I could play FPSes and other games where "keyboard + mouse" control is necessary, on the Xbox 360, I would ditch the PC for gaming, and hence for everything, altogether!

The last time I left you, I had just completed a transplant of my HTPC into a new Antec P182 chassis. That mission was a complete success. I've built enough PCs over the years, and it is such a nicely designed case, that the hardest decision I had to make was which hockey game to watch while I was doing it.

Well I attempted another operation on my "new" PC last night that didn't go quite as smoothly as the previous one: re-installing Windows Vista. I've had a few really annoying and perplexing problems with the system, like not being able to stay connected to Unreal Tournament 3 online games, and not being able to use The Orange Box at all because Steam won't work. The computer has had a number of hardware and software changes and configurations (TV tuner cards, wireless network cards, sound cards, video drivers and post-processing software, video codecs, etc.) throughout the past year so I chalk it all up to messed up config files and/or drivers. Seemed like the perfect time for a re-install.

The machine has two hard disks in it, both of the 2.5" laptop variety (for silence): an 80GB Fujitsu 5400RPM, and a 160GB Seagate 7200RPM. I've had the Fujitsu all along and added the Seagate later on, so the system was installed on the 80GB drive and the 160GB drive was used as a data disk.

Since I was re-installing the OS and wiping out both drives, I decided to use the newer 160GB for the system disk. Its SATA2 interface and 7200RPM spindle speed should give a nice boost in performance over the SATA1/5400RPM Fujitsu drive. The 80GB Fujitsu would go in my Vantec EZ Swap EX to be used as a removable, portable data disk. I formatted the Seagate in the current installation of Vista, rebooted and launched Vista setup from the DVD.

All was great until the point where you select which disk you would like to install Vista on. The menu didn't display the Seagate drive, only the Fujitsu. Of course, both drives appear in the BIOS, and I had been using both of them in Vista already. Strange.

Another strange phenomenon: during Vista setup, where you choose which drive you want to install on, you can choose to load a driver disk for any controllers that might not have been automatically detected. I did this for both onboard SATA controllers by loading the drivers onto a USB thumb drive, but to no avail. However, when I clicked the Browse button to load the drivers, I could actually see the Seagate drive in the list. So Vista was detecting the disk, even mounting it and allowing me to browse it, but refusing to install to it.

After attempting to use driver disks for the on-board SATA controllers (yes, I tried both), using the Disk Management snap-in in Vista to reformat and mark the partition as "Active", setting the SATA ports to use Legacy mode instead of Native mode, even trying out AHCI and RAID modes on the SATA controllers, all without getting Vista setup to recognize the drive, I was getting frustrated. I removed the Fujitsu completely, tried the Seagate in all ports on its own, and no luck. Searching online just kept producing the same advice: install the SATA controller drivers. Well I tried that, and it didn't work.

Another thread online recommended that I use Seagate DiscWizard to prepare the drive for installation. The author said that Vista might not install to a disk until it is "zeroed out". I downloaded and installed DiscWizard, which took quite a while as the download was slow and the install even slower for some reason. When I finally ran the program, it had the balls to tell me that I didn't have a Seagate drive installed in the computer! Looking in the Windows Device Manager, of course it says that the drive is right there, model ST9160823AS. ARGH. Apparently DiscWizard doesn't work well with SATA drives, according to other online posts.

Then, disaster struck...

As I was rebooting for what seemed like the 100th time, I re-inserted the hot-swap EZ Swap EX drive carrier (containing the 80GB Fujitsu with the current Vista install on it) into the bay, during the BIOS POST. I thought "it's hot-swap SATA, shouldn't be a problem"--famous last words. The BIOS POSTed and came to the boot screen, it tried to boot off the disk and just printed a bunch of mangled symbols on the screen. "Great", I thought, I just toasted the drive. At least it wasn't the Seagate!

The machine would no longer boot from that disk. Now I was thinking I should just give up and re-install Vista on the Fujitsu, but when I selected it as the install destination, Vista setup said "Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation". Oh boy, I'd really done it now. FUBAR. Now I had no Vista installation at all, and no disks that would work.

Then, by some supernatural twist of fate, I managed to find an article on the (wait for it...) Microsoft (!) support database with that error message on it. The article mentioned some of the command line tools available in the setup program, in particular, one command called "diskpart". The tool could list your disks, and when run with a "clean all" command, zero out all data on the drive. It does things that Disk Management and "format" restrict you from doing. Perfect, and by all accounts this was my last possible hope of getting this thing to work without buying a new hard drive.

I ran "diskpart" -> "select disk 0" -> "clean all", and sure enough it cleaned the drive. Then "select disk 1" -> "clean all", and the other disk was zeroed out. Reboot, start Vista setup, voila! Both disks listed in the installation destination choices. Select the Seagate disk, boom! It works. After the huge move to eliminate DOS from the Windows manifest, and after all of my attempts to use current technology to fix the problem, one good old DOS command saves the day.

I went to bed at this point, five hours after beginning this crusade, but when I woke up in the morning, a fresh installation of Vista was waiting for me. Was it worth the trouble? Find out in my next few blog posts.

Moral of the story? Command line rules, FTW!