Vista users, please read : some advice.

[Kryten]

Sorry for the seemingly negative views/advice I've been giving regarding Vista of late, but I do often feel obliged to warn people of any potential or actual issues they may have in it's use.

This one is something that not even Microsoft are willing to inform you of, not in their forums or knowledgebase - and will affect you if you file swap from Vista to XP or intend to "downgrade" from Vista to XP.

Vista's version of the NTFS file system is ever so slightly different to that in XP and 2000, and as a result, like me, copying files to a hard drive or device formatted in Vista's NTFS, and trying to read them on an XP machine, you'll have a nicely corrupt bunch of files.
Small files are often unaffected, however files over a certain size will be partially or entirely fucked.

I've downgraded twice to XP from Vista since February (yeah, I know) and have suffered this issue twice. I've only found this information out by putting heads together with like minded people and an "MVP" via msdn.
Not that I've tried, but ensuring the destination device/drive is formated with FAT32 instead (or just burning to dvd/cd) will stop this from being a problem. As I've ignored FAT32 for some time, this never occured to me, and as a result lost a lot of data. Nothing important though, as always important stuff is kept safe on DVD too

Just so you folks are aware, hopefully it won't affect anyone, but I'd feel shit not saying something

 

[Mazling]

Thanks, will remember this

 

[SheepCow]

Oooh that's fun. I didn't experience this but I don't think I ever let Vista format any drive other than C: (my data is on other drives) so when I went back I nuked C: to get XP on.

Interestingly the reason I went back had nothing to do with drivers etc. I just got annoyed that games ran slower and alt-tabbing when ingame often took about 45 seconds as Vista re-enabled the Aero shizzles.

 

[Overdriven]

Cheers for this, will warn some people I know with Vista. Will keep it in my head aswell. (If I eventually migrate to Vista)

 

[soze]

I have not had this problem yet and i bounce alot of 4gb iso files around. I do however dual boot on all of my machines so i create the partition i install Vista on under disk manager in XP i wonder if that is where i have got lucky.

 

[Kryten]

More than likely. I would imagine the problem will only occur when you're copying onto a drive formatted using Vista's NTFS and then you try and access it from XP.

 

[Flintlock]

There seems to be a problem - or lack of advice or info - with creating user accounts with Vista too. I received a call the other night from my cousin about his inability to install his internet providers software, or any software come to that. A warning came up saying he didn't have administrative so and sos to be able to carry this out? This occurred after he had created a user account. He couldn't install anything after and there wasn't access to any admin account! As far as I was aware the first account you create is an admin account so I was more than a little stumped by this. On booting the computer up no option was available to access any admin account either. This was on a brand new Dell computer and even the Dell hot line guy was at a loss. I then did a search on the internet and found lots were in the same boat. It seems Microsoft have beefed up admin and user security. The only solution I came across - well there were 2 but the first failed - was that you have to mess around in the Registry first! I left it well alone and told my cousin to leave it to Dell -which he must have done. I have yet to find out the answer and will post it when I do get the info. It might be something silly but when I carried out a google search lots of techies were in a quandary over it too. Looked more like a bug than anything to me. It seems the first user account is an admin account but Microsoft have then disabled the admin capabilities. You have to switch them on! How to do so seems to be the problem. Bit odd it seems to me.

 

[Kryten]

That doesn't seem entirely suprising - I've heard a few "iffy" stories about Vista preinstalled on Compaq and Dell systems - many of them the very reason that Dell have gone back to offering XP with their kit.

Vista isn't entirely terrible - it's just not unlike XP on release, it has it's share of large issues and just needs a lot of fixing - so we'll be waiting with baited breath for Service Pack 1.

 

[Whipped]

I've been getting by just fine. Haven't suffered from the corrupt file issues, but I think that's because my Data partition was formatted with XP and then the C:\ partition was wiped to put Vista on.

I have just started Dual Booting to XP on another harddrive, but simply because EA have yet to fix the multitude of problems with the Battlefield series in Vista.

Overall I'm liking the new OS, but as with most people, am awaiting that all important SP1 in a few months time.

 

[soze]

the defult account is administrator on new HPs might be the same on dells but it is disabled by default. You have to go into computer manager and enable the account then log off click other user and type the username there. I have not seen a button appear for admin on any of the machines i ran up yet.

 

[strangely brown]

I've had Vista now for a couple of months, and, judging by others' comments in these forums guess I had been very lucky in that all my hardware seemed to work properly with it.

But then, yesterday I had a serious squeaky bum moment...

Now, on XP, I had always liked the hibernate feature and preferred to use this instead of suspend (when my laptop suspends, it still has a couple of flashing lights which I find annoying). For some reason, hibernate was not in the power profiles options for the power button actions. I read on the web (through microsoft's own help system) that there was a way to re-enable the hibernate options. Great, I followed the instructions, and low and behold, hibernation was now possible.

Let's give it a whirl then... Told it to hibernate... It looked like it was doing it... and all of a sudden, a dreaded BSOD with the words INTERNAL_POWER_FAILURE plastered on it before my laptop switched off.

Whoops. Bugger.

Tried to reboot. Up comes the RAID BIOS screen - Array 1 non-functional - Offline.

Double whoops. Double bugger.

There was nothing about this in the microsoft help!!!

Fearing the worst (it's RAID mode 0 - striping so no recovery is possible). Into the fasttrack raid utility at boot, tried all options to recover/restart the RAID to no avail. Only one thing left to do and that is to erase the RAID array and re-create it.

Now, I do backup my data to an external drive on a regular basis, so if the lappy's disks were to fail, it's not such a big deal - More an inconvenience of having to do the re-install and get everything set up again the way I like it.

When I re-created the array, it allowed me to do it without writing anything to the disks, and after I exited and re-booted... And Vista came back up! I was so relieved.

So, now hibernation is turned off... And I don't think I'll go looking for any more trouble...

Regards,
SB

 

[Mazling]

Ubuntu installer decided to poop all over my raid and create its own setup. Nothing was overwritten or lost (so it seems...) - quite lucky imho.

 

[cHodAX]

Someone should sticky this thread, this information could save some people alot of serious data loss.

+rep for you Kryten and thanks for the heads up.

 

[Jarakin]

Sorry for the seemingly negative views/advice I've been giving regarding Vista of late, but I do often feel obliged to warn people of any potential or actual issues they may have in it's use.

This one is something that not even Microsoft are willing to inform you of, not in their forums or knowledgebase - and will affect you if you file swap from Vista to XP or intend to "downgrade" from Vista to XP.

Vista's version of the NTFS file system is ever so slightly different to that in XP and 2000, and as a result, like me, copying files to a hard drive or device formatted in Vista's NTFS, and trying to read them on an XP machine, you'll have a nicely corrupt bunch of files.
Small files are often unaffected, however files over a certain size will be partially or entirely fucked.

I've downgraded twice to XP from Vista since February (yeah, I know) and have suffered this issue twice. I've only found this information out by putting heads together with like minded people and an "MVP" via msdn.
Not that I've tried, but ensuring the destination device/drive is formated with FAT32 instead (or just burning to dvd/cd) will stop this from being a problem. As I've ignored FAT32 for some time, this never occured to me, and as a result lost a lot of data. Nothing important though, as always important stuff is kept safe on DVD too

Just so you folks are aware, hopefully it won't affect anyone, but I'd feel shit not saying something

What about copying data from Vista to an NTFS formatted external HDD? Will that data then still be buggered if transferred from the ext. hdd to XP rendering it only useful on vista? Also, if the ext. hdd is formatted under vista as NTFS, presumably the same cross-platform will persist rendering the hdd useless under xp?

Also - My dad's about to buy a laptop for use at work, have been looking at a Dell Inspiron 6400 and was going to get Vista Business with it, he'll be using remote access software at home to access a Windows XP system at work... with this fairly major problem, I guess I should really advise him to just get XP Pro instead of Vista?

 

[Kryten]

I don't think it will be worth writing Vista off just because of this problem, it just means you have to be very careful indeed.

Swapping files between machines is no problem, as transferring via network is independant of the file system, and you'd normally keep things like USB pens formatted in FAT32, again eliminating the issue. Remote access (Depending on what sort you use/what software) works just like a network in that the files are independant of the file system at either end so again, no problems.

The problem *only* occurs as far as I can tell when you format a drive within vista using Vista's NTFS. If the external drive is formatted with FAT32 or XP's NTFS, you'll have no issues.

It's really a rather trivial issue, so for day to day users it's not going to pose any great problem, but as happened to myself and possibly others, it will easily catch you out

 

[Bodhi]

I've been dual booting XP and Vista for some time now, haven't had an issue. Don't see what all the moaning's about tbh, it's XP but flashier.

 

[Kryten]

I've not been dual booting, however have Vista on a separate 80gb drive. I'm waiting to come across a cheap eSATA controller so I don't have to keep diving inside my case to swap over (Because I got rather bored of dual booting, and more to the point the wife kept whinging at all the menus at startup)

Now that raises a point - I've not tried transferring anything large over from the Vista drive to XP whilst using the latter - might give it a try, unless Bodhi feels like doing us a favour and trying

If not I'll have a look tonight.

 

[Kryten]

Update:

Slightly bored, so gave it a go - and sure enough, any .exe file from Vista is CRC'd when it's copied over to XP. Might see if I can get hold of some of the chaps over at MS to get this properly confirmed, as there's still nothing mentioning this either on their support forums or knowledgebase.

 

[Bodhi]

All my drives were formatted in XP could this be the reason I've had no problems? Could it also be the answer if you need to still use XP?

 

[soze]

Update:

Slightly bored, so gave it a go - and sure enough, any .exe file from Vista is CRC'd when it's copied over to XP. Might see if I can get hold of some of the chaps over at MS to get this properly confirmed, as there's still nothing mentioning this either on their support forums or knowledgebase.

During set up on my laptop i moved a far few install.exe files about messenger ect and i did not see a problem but like above dual booting machine. Formating your drive in xp could well be the answer to a happy Vista Install.

 

[Kryten]

It is indeed.
Put simply, Vista will work fine using XP's NTFS file system and you won't have any issues transferring anything over from that.
I mentioned using FAT32 for external/backup drives merely to be on the safe side - I tend to do this anyway in case i need that data urgently on a non windows system - saying that, nearly all the major Linux dist's read/write NTFS now. I wonder how they cope with Vista's version of it.

 

[ford prefect]

Yeah I've had the same issues as Kryten on three machines at work. Upgraded all three at the same time and then found they had a hardware incompatibility, then came across the ntfs bug too, it was a nightmare. Luckily I'm old fashioned and still keep a tape backup on everything on my office network, so managed to restore XP and all the office files without too much hassle.

I would advise anyone who is thinking about upgrading to vista at work to hold back until service pack 1 has been released and well and truely tested.

 

[soze]

I would advise anyone who is thinking about upgrading to vista at work to hold back until service pack 1 has been released and well and truely tested.

Thats abit OTT you just build a test machine fr your network if it works use it if not don't. All this waiting for a SP seems silly. Can see why the Vista guy joked and said and we will release a 12k patch tomorrow called SP1 on release day. Soo many IT people saying dont touch it till SP1

 

[Kryten]

Depends entirely on the circumstances. The larger companies have access to virtualisation technology to test compatibility before large scale rollouts/upgrades, and for smaller people, it doesnt hurt to make a small partition for testing purposes on a spare box to see how it goes.
I'm not having any other real issues, at least none that would stop me upgrading to Vista.

Most the problems that Vista is having is really "targeted" to home users - there's not a great deal for office workstations that's gonna bother a vista pc. Unless the user is streaming media and copying files over networks

 

[soze]

Depends entirely on the circumstances. The larger companies have access to virtualisation technology to test compatibility before large scale rollouts/upgrades, and for smaller people, it doesnt hurt to make a small partition for testing purposes on a spare box to see how it goes.
I'm not having any other real issues, at least none that would stop me upgrading to Vista.

Most the problems that Vista is having is really "targeted" to home users - there's not a great deal for office workstations that's gonna bother a vista pc. Unless the user is streaming media and copying files over networks

Yeap thats where Virtual PC being free is a god send you can test applications with out a seperate box

 

[PLightstar]

Just reading through some of those posts, as I am thinking of putting vista ultimate on a new pc that I am building. But I am still unsure wether to make the jump or not? its primarily going to be a gaming PC, I have an external HD which has most of my info backed up onto. Does anyone know if I will run into any problems transferring the data onto a Vista HD?

 

[Kryten]

If it's formatted by XP using NTFS there's a possibility of that indeed. What might be an idea, as its an external drive, find a friend thats gone over to Vista and plug into his system, copy over a couple of .exe installer files or compressed zip/rar files and see if they run/extract fully.

 

[Jonty]

Hi Kryten

Thanks for the advice, it might save me some headaches as I'll be downgrading from Vista to XP today. I've used Vista for almost a year and, as someone who generally likes Microsoft's offerings, I really feel sick and tired of them recently (except the Office team, who still seem to be heading in the right direction).

Over the last year there have been so many issues with Vista: driver problems, incompatabilities with Microsoft's own products, and my computer's performance is gradually degrading despite my best efforts (and despite the fact that Vista is supposed to optimise itself).

The final straw came recently after installing SP1. I know it's only a Release Candidate, but I found it addressed very little (goodness help companies who are waiting for it). I then sadly bought some new (Microsoft) hardware, installed it, and something when catastrophically wrong. Sometimes I'll boot and a whole host of system programs will fail immediately upon logging in. I tried to fix things, but I can no longer access the control panel or other important system utilities because of permission errors (even though I'm an administrator). I can't rollback my system, all user accounts are affected, and attempts to manually revert to an earlier statIe are unsuccessful.

So today I'll backup my data (carefully, thanks to your advice) and switch back to XP. I hope to buy a new laptop this year and it'll almost certainly be running XP or Leopard after my experiences. I know this is nothing new for many people, but as someone who's taken so much stick for supporting Microsoft in the past, it seems a very sad day indeed.

Kind regards

Jonty

Update ~ Sorry, I just felt like moaning before, my future posts will be more constructive. Roll on Windows 7 please

 

[Kryten]

heh, don't worry about it - a problem shared is a problem halved and all that - we're all entitled to a moan every now and then.

You've been a stranger of late though, Jonty - where've you been hiding?

 

[Jonty]

heh, don't worry about it - a problem shared is a problem halved and all that - we're all entitled to a moan every now and then.

You've been a stranger of late though, Jonty - where've you been hiding?

Hi Kryten

Thank you I'm now happily back using XP. Perhaps when I buy my next laptop I'll try Vista again (I would consider a Mac if they weren't so exorbitantly expensive for ones with decent hardware).

As for me, I've just been very busy with work and life, but I'm happy so I'm not complaining. However, you and the others are the stars here, so I'm glad I'm not missed

Kind regards