RAID and pain

A simple exercise of fixing RAID set up issue turned into a complete re installation of Vista on my desktop, and caused a whole day of frustration. All these because DELL set up the partition under RAID.

I did found a solution to make OS created under RAID to work under the "AutoDetect" setting, but when I tried to setting the Acronis OS selector so that I can choose between XP and Vista, the system got so totally messed up. Eventually I had to reinstall the Vista Basic from scratch. And even that was not easy since the Vista installation failed to see the disks properly. It's like Vista kept thinking that the disks were controlled by RAID, which I assumed a giant 800G partition was representing. The problem seemed to be resolved after I updated firmware to a newer version. After then that crazy virtual RAID partition stopped messing with Vista installation, and I finally got a clean Vista OS.

I did gain something thru out this exercise:
- The previous failed Microsoft Livecam 1.3 worked on my clean Vista Os.
- Similary, ZoneAlarm for Vista worked, instead of the rule screen of death that I got

Well, gain some, loss some:
- portable Photoshop CS 3 failed even though other portable Adobe software worked.

Compare with XP, the Vista Basic really runs smoother. Maybe it's the better multicore support of Vista.

It's still difficult to switch between XP and Vista. But now that I have tried XP on my box, I probably won't stay with XP. To a certain extend, I still had a feeling that there was something I didn't do right on the XP installation.