I'm installing a copy of vista ultimate on my desktop. I've got the ultimate because it has everything... including the media center and backup. Which is rather useful.

The installation is on a non-clean HDD, which has already linux installed on it.

First Try

Had a NTFS partition made already as the first partition. Shoved in the Vista dvd and rebooted. Selected to get the installation running, entered the serial number, and got to the partition selection.

Bummer. The infamous Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation . S'hugar!

My first instinct was: Darn, they've set it so you can only install on a clean HDD... It sort of would make sense, because OEM is about a third of the full license price. So I went to linux and made a backup of my home directory. Which was overdue anyway...

Midway through it dawned to me: windows partition has to be primary AND with the bootable flag set.

It looks like the setup partitioning algorithm is:

if (partition exists) then
  do not change anything (maybe just format it)
else if (partition does not exist)
  create and format partition
  if (there is NO bootable flag present) then
    set bootable flag on windows partition
  else
    do not do anything

which is a crap piece of code...

The installation

After fdisk-ing in linux the partition to set the windows partition as bootable, everything went smoothly... got ATI's drivers, Avast antivirus, Firefox and a bunch of other tiny utilities installed. Weee!!!

Now, back to work to re-enable linux! :)