Vista Build 5456 wiped my dual boot, family now in therapy

For some time now I have been running windows Vista Beta 2. Since my experiences with IE7 and vista where not so great in terms of stability I decided to upgrade my Vista installation to the newer build 5456 available at Microsoft connect.

While the machine was running the upgrade I was not paying much attention and after it finished somewhere late at night I decided to shut down the computer and do the additional discovery of how the upgrade went to a later point in time.

But today I got a disturbing telephone call at work from my wife and my son. He wanted to play his favorite game Robots and was not able to continue his game because to him Windows appeared to be gone. My son already got used to the dual boot menu and was able to pick windows XP as his favorite gaming platform, but now came downstairs somewhat disturbed telling my wife daddy had been messing with the computer again.

(Just for you who don’t know, my son is 5 years old and already advices me of Graphic card I need to buy for his games and outperforms my computer skillsJ)

Any way, I decided to come home early and rescue the family from this disturbing incident. Assuming they did something wrong of course.

So I went upstairs, told my son to reboot the machine and I would show him how to pick windows XP from the dual boot screen. But to my astonishment it was me who messed up the computer with my upgrade. For some reason windows Vista decided I would not need my older version of windows any more and removed the dual boot screen entirely leaving me with no option then to use Vista.

It took me some browsing around the internet, but there I found my salvation. I already figured out I would need to work with bcedit.exe to fix the boot, but I found that to be to cumbersome and hoped for something better. I found a tool called VistaBootPRO.exe. This provided me with a user interface on top of bcedit.exe and it helped me define an additional version of windows to boot. After adding the old version of windows to the boot manager again, I was able to select XP at startup. You can find the tool here.

I must say it was rather interesting to see how my computer appeared to be disintegrating my family by the fact it did not work anymore. I always assumed they did not use the thing and I was the computer freak around the house. It now gets me worried that I have a computer addicted family. Coping with myself alone was something I could live with, but having my whole family addicted is something I must get used to first. It was a close call, but I managed to keep my family together and my son now thinks I am cool again.

We will be going on holiday this week. After I am back I will be writing more on the things I have been up to the past months. You might have noticed the low frequency of my posts, but I have been pretty busy with nice things regarding Visual Studio Team System and Software factories. When I am back I hope I can write some more on the wok that kept me busy the past weeks and show you what I have been doing.