Every now and then I get really, really tired of Linux. The last thing that almost drove me to the point of insanity was when every single browser was crashing every few minutes, but it’s also known for not recognizing usb hard drives, having buggy sound, not being able to connect to certain wireless networks, having software with completely unmeetable dependencies, and having file managers and desktop environments that won’t start and won’t give any error messages (if you’ve never experienced one or more of these issues, you are lying).

However, once you’ve spent a few days trying to install pretty much any version of Windows, you quickly realize how lucky you are that you’ve found Linux, because there’s nothing as frustrating and annoying as having to reinstall Windows if you don’t have the drivers that came with your computer.

This is the story of how my brother’s laptop stopped working, and how I eventually fixed it.

The computer

My brother is the proud owner of an HP Pavilion dv6500 Entertainment Notebook. It’s one of those clunky, overpriced gaming laptops with video cards that drink electricity and piss heat - but if you’re a big PC gamer and for some reason need to be able to take your computer with you, it’s a fairly decent machine.

At around $1000, it comes preinstalled with Windows Vista basic. The specs are as follows. Just remember that this beast was released back in 2007 (I believe), so it’s not brand new.

Now, if you’ve ever used Vista, you know that it’s the most clunky piece of shit to ever have been released by Microsoft. Sure, the service pack did fix some stuff, but the fact is that a lot of people still prefer to use Windows XP over Vista, even though the former is now 9 years old.

After having used his computer for a few months or even a year, my brother asked me if I could get rid of Vista for him, and install a dual boot between XP and Ubuntu instead. Of course I was happy to help him and set it all up for him. Finding the drivers was an extreme pain (we’ll get to that later), but once everything was done, he had a pretty sweet setup.

Installing Windows XP

Fast forward 6 months, and his Windows system is now completely overrun with viruses and (after a rescue attempt by our father) will now not boot. Of course, on the Linux side everything was running smoothly, but his XP system was just completely busted. So I dug out an old XP disc, wiped the XP partition and reinstalled the OS. What I did not do was save all the drivers that I was going to need, because I figured those would be easily available from the HP website.

Boy was that stupid.

After the installation process completed (which only took like 1½ hour, by the way) I was thrown into a 1024×640 (I think. It was some kind of weird resolution anyway) desktop with no video acceleration, no sound, no network, no support for the mouse scroll thingy (!), and pretty much no support for anything but USB2 and PS2. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo!

So I use my laptop to go to the HP website, navigate my way to what I think should be the correct laptop (called HP Pavilion dv6500 CTO on the website). I’m not sure what CTO stands for, so I’m just going to assume that it means Community Treatment Order. Once there, I choose to browse the drivers for Windows XP, and what do I find?

1. Drivers for the touchpad.
2. Drivers for the quick launch buttons.
3. Some print drivers.
4. HP Wireless Assistant (not a driver for the network card, mind you).
5. BIOS, in case I need to flash my notebook.
6. Firmware upgrades for some Hitachi hard drives.
7. A single security upgrade.
8. Lightscribe stuff.

Yeah, that’s it. While I agree that the touchpad drivers are kind of nice, I really don’t care about that other stuff. Where are the drivers for the video card? Where are the drivers for the network card? Where are the sound drivers? That’s what I need. I don’t give a shit about lightscribe and fscking quick launch buttons!

At this point I’m just pissed. Of course Windows device manager doesn’t recognize half of my hardware, and without a working internet connection there’s really no point in even trying to automatically search for drivers. So, what now?

I decide that I’m just done with XP. That beast is getting really, really old anyway, so why not just give in to the times and restore Vista. My brother doesn’t even seem to like Ubuntu because of the lack of good, commercial games, so why bother keeping it around?

Recovering the recovery partition

Since the whole point of having a recovery partition is that you don’t actually need to have a disc, I figured restoring Vista would be a piece of cake. After reading on the internet it seemed all I had to do was press F11 during the boot up process. Naturally that didn’t work.

Instead, pressing F11 led me to what I like to call the “start-Windows-XP-in-safe-mode”-screen. Not too helpful. But I figured that simply deleting the XP partition (leaving only the recovery partition) would give me the correct option during bootup. Not surprisingly, that didn’t work either. Now it would attempt to go into the “start-Windows-XP-in-safe-mode”-screen, but fail and instead restart the computer. Great!

After crying for a bit, I started reading on the net about other ways to access the recovery partition. On this one blog I did find a link to a torrent with a Windows Vista Recovery image, that was released by Microsoft as a way to fix your Vista installation in case of emergencies. It sounded pretty neat, so I downloaded it, burned it to a CD and booted off of that.

Holy mother of something incredibly holy, it actually worked! After what I must say was a pretty nice looking boot process it got me into a minimal GUI environment where I was presented with the following choices (although not using that old and ugly GUI toolkit):

I ran the startup repair tool to see if I could get it to fix the MBR so that I would be able to boot into the recovery partition, and it actually did! While it wasn’t able to restore Vista to it’s former glory self,it did allow me to access the HP Recovery Manager by pressing F11 at bootup.

The HP Recovery Manager

I think the HP Recovery Manager was designed for complete idiots who have simply f-ed up their computer beyond any hope, and are now just hoping to restore it back to the way it was when they got it. In theory, that sounds great. But when you think about it, aren’t morons the same people who buy support subscriptions where they can just send their computer away and have their harddrives formatted and re-imaged?

Anyway, all you really need to do is press next a couple of times. It did find the recovery partition, so at least for a moment it seemed like it was all going to work. Then I got the most helpful error message ever:

An error has occured. The error code is: 0×4001100200000100A

Contact HP if this error persists.

Of course the problem is going to persist! When has a software error ever gone away on its own!?

After doing some researched it seems like the problem likely occurred from having resized other partitions on the hard drive, causing the recovery partition to go into a deep identity crisis from which it will never come out the same again.

So, what now? I could spend 3 hours of my life stuck on the phone with HP just so that they can tell me that they can ship a recovery disc to me for only $50, or I could somehow “obtain” a Windows Vista installation disc and use the license key that came with the computer…

Tough choice…

Installing Windows Vista

The reason I figured I’d install Windows Vista instead of XP is that I knew that there were a bunch of drivers available for Vista (for his computer model) from the HP website.

The installation process took litterally forever to complete, but at least it was very easy. Of course you didn’t really get to customize anything, but then again, at least it had the courtesy of asking the questions before starting to install - unlike XP, that asks questions at random intervals, stopping the installation until you’ve answered them.

After about a gazillion reboots, it logged me in to the Vista desktop (without the fancy 3D-stuff). I hadn’t touched Vista in a long, long time, and I really have to say that I’m even less impressed with the look of the desktop now. Maybe KDE4 has just spoiled me.

Even though I had hoped that Vista would at least have some drivers for the wireless card, it didn’t. So once again I had no access to the internet. However, plugging in an ethernet cable did work, so now at least I could download the drivers directly - instead of having to transfer them from my laptop to this one.

I went back to HP’s website and downloaded every single driver that I seemed to need, and subsequently installed them. While most, if not all, were severely outdated, at least they were all available in one spot. That gave me 3d-acceleration, sound, and various other stuff that could be nice to have - but no wireless internet.

So I went and downloaded something called Driver Genius, which is basically an application that checks your hardware to see if your drivers are working or if they are old, and then downloads new ones for you. Right away it found that the drivers to the wireless card were not installed (even though I had installed them), so I asked it to download them for me, and then I try to open the .zip-files - with no success. All the downloaded files were corrupted, and I was back to square one.

Frustration, hopelessness, and finally, salvation

By now I was ready to chuck the computer out the Window and tell my brother to just install OpenSuse instead. It’s just not right that I shouldn’t be able resize or move partitions without fucking up the only other way to restore the operating system that I’ve legally bought. The whole point of actually purchasing software is that it’s supposed to be easy to install and use, so if my legally purchased copy of Windows Vista can’t be installed via the medium that came with the computer, what’s the fucking point in buying it in the first place!?

Sure, I could have used the HP Recovery Manager to create a recovery disc (when Vista was still installed), but I see two problems with that:

1. If I have to burn a disc and make sure that I don’t lose or scratch it, why couldn’t they just have sent me a recovery disc with the computer?
2. I’m a pretty tech savvy guy, but I had no idea that you were supposed to do that (because then what’s the point of the recovery partition?). What about Joe Schmoe who bought a computer just so that he could watch porn and play Minesweeper? If Windows is supposed to be so user friendly and simply, then why the fuck would it require its users to create a disc image of a recovery partition? It’s just stupid!

Out of nothing but sheer desperation I go through the directory created during the wireless driver installation process. To my surprise, I find two executables in there. One called setup and one with some random name I can’t seem to remember. Thinking “I just don’t give a shit anymore”, I start both of them and go through the installation process(es), and presto!

We have lift-off! We are on the air! Ladies and gentlemen, we now have wireless networking!

Why it would require me to install one directory with two other installation files that I also need to run, I do not know. But that’s what needed to be done, apparent. Of course all the drivers were pretty much ancient, but other than the video driver (which was easily updated by a visit to nvidia’s website), I don’t really care.

Conclusion

What did I learn from these two days of battling with trying to install Windows XP and/or Vista? I learned that unless you have a disc with all the drivers you need, installing Windows is really, really hard. The average consumer probably doesn’t know how to check what hardware is in his computer, and if he doesn’t, he’s completely screwed.

I’ve also learned that installing Windows is a painfully long process that requires so many reboots it’s not even funny. And seriously, it’s 2009 (ok, so Vista was released in 2006), why doesn’t the operating come with a set of drivers to at least get networking going so that you can fetch more drivers? Linux seems to be able to do that (I have yet to have any hardware not being recognized by Linux) just fine, so why can’t Microsoft do it? I know that a lot of the drivers are developed and distributed by a third-party, but I’m not talking full 3d-acceleration and 7.1 sound - I just need to get networking fully working, the rest is just a bonus.

So after this painful experience, I’ve decided that I will never buy a computer that comes pre-installed with Windows unless it also comes with a full installation cd. No recovery discs. No recovery partitions. Just a fully working installation disc with all the drivers I need to get my computer working. That’s it.

Because, you know what?

Windows rarely just works.