notch in vista’s belt
vista’s boot repair is a huge improvement over previous versions of windows. see below.
i had a couple 120gb sata drives laying around and decided to slap them in RAID-0 with my motherboard’s intel matrix RAID. installed vista-64 with the normal RAID/AHCI driver diskette. a 500gb sata disk comes back from warranty and proves to be faster than the two 120’s in RAID-0. i loaded up my favorite windows PE environment (with associated driver diskette), mirrored the contents from the RAID stripe to the 500gb disk, and rebooted.
vista-64 wouldn’t boot, couldn’t locate some files. i did get the splash screen though. so i threw my vista-64 DVD back in the drive and booted from it. once at the setup menu, i chose Repair Windows. it found problems with the boot sector and fixed them. i removed the dvd and it booted just fine.
had this been windows XP, i would have had to reinstall. instead, it was running again within five minutes.