We spent most of the week this week working on a Sony Vaio laptop. Normally when we tell a customer we'll upgrade a machine from XP or Vista to Windows 7 we tell them it takes anywhere from 3-4 actual hours to do it. No we don't sit and watch it for 3-4 hours but anyone who has upgraded a Windows XP box to Vista can tell you it takes a very long time.
This week we were treated to a new challenge that managed to push close to our time wasted records. A Sony Vaio laptop came in early this week and after trying the usual routes of upgrade (yea just stick a disc in the thing right?) we had to begin falling back on alternative measures, some of which we know work, others were pure experimentation.
Just accept that Windows 7 wouldn't boot. Nuff said. We then tried our least favorite method - Upgrade to Vista then Windows 7. The process is long and painful to say the least, but it usually works. This time it hung up at around 20% every time. We even blanked the hard drive and tried going from a clean Windows XP load. No luck.
Next up - Network boot from PXE. TOTAL FAILURE. The laptop wouldn't do it.
We even went so far as to plug the drive into another machine and run various disk partition solutions to dump a Windows 7 folder on the drive and boot into Windows PE directly. Nope no luck there.
Final attempts all involved ghosting the machine from various Windows 7 installations around the office just to get something on the drive we could work with. Again we were met with failure.
Why am I telling you this? Shouldn't I only keep to successes on our company blog? Occasionally we get stumped, thats life. We use heroic measures but as Adam Savage said on Myth Busters - failure IS an option. I can honestly say we tried everything to make this happen for the customer. I can't say whether it was due to a failed piece of hardware or just an incompatibility with the BIOS on this specific model. Perhaps some of both.....
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