I apologize for the length of this diatribe. Here we go. I bought a new
computer two years ago. It. came with Vista Home Premium 32 bit. I upgraded
to Vista Ultimate 32 bit. No problem. I saved a full image of Ultimate to an
external HD using Acronis. I did a clean install of Win 7 Beta when it was
released.
I decided to remove the Win 7 Beta and go back to Vista Ultimate using the
Acronis Image. The Acronis image of Vista Ultimate destroyed my boot sector
and I could not go back to the Vista Ultimate image so I did a repair using
the Win 7 repair DVD I had made. That fixed the boot problem.
I then had to do a custom install of the original OEM Vista Home Premium,
with the intent of doing a clean install of Vista Ultimate as an upgrade to
the Vista Home Premium. I selected "format" during the OEM Vista Home
Premium custom install but was not offered a full reformat. It installed
with no problems, or so I thought. My C Drive has always been one partition.
I don't use recovery partitions and I don't partition my internal HD for
dual boot or any other reasons.
I then decided to do the custom install of my Vista Ultimate 64 bit in place
of the Vista Home Premium 32 bit. I know you can't upgrade a 32 bit to a 64
bit. I received a blue screen with error code STOP: 0x0000007E
(0xFFFFFFFFC0000005, 0xFFFFF8000985E251, 0xFFFFF98000E0EB98,
0xFFFFF98000E0E570. No driver was listed as causing the problem. I spent
appx. 18 hours researching the problem, to no avail. I then decided to just
do an in place upgrade using my Vista Ultimate 32 bit.
I've done many upgrades and custom installs before, never having any
problems. I made sure that I had installed Vista SP1 for the purpose of
eliminating the "Vista won't install if you have over 3 GB of memory"
problem. My memory sticks all checked out. I tested my internal C Drive and
everything is OK. I went into my BIOS and disabled caching and shadowing. I
did everything I could think of to find the problem but came up empty.
Upon inserting my Vista Ultimate 32 bit DVD, with the intent of doing an in
place upgrade I received a small error window stating that there was not
enough room on my "D Drive" for the installation. I right clicked on
Computer and selected Manage, then Disk Management. It shows Disk 0 as
partitioned, with a System Reserved (D (100 MB NTFS, Healthy-System,
Active, Primary Partition) and (C (297.99 GB NTFS, Healthy-Boot, Page
File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition). My DVD Drive had been renamed G
(previously D), my DVD RW Drive had been renamed H (previously E), with my
two external drives being renamed E and F (always F and G before).
So, as it now stands I can't do a clean install because of the blue screen
problem. I can't upgrade because Vista Ultimate 32 bit wants to install to D
instead of C. I don't understand why my custom reinstall of Vista Home
Premium 32 bit is on my C Drive yet the Vista Ultimate 32 bit wants to
install to D.
What the hell is going on? I'm certainly not going to go out and buy a full
version of Windows 7 Ultimate and not be able to do a custom install. I
remember that during my troubleshooting I came across an article dealing
with "cannot install a new OS on a computer using a processor other than
Intel when the original OEM image was placed using an Intel processor.
However, I can't locate that article again. There was a registry change that
would eliminate that particular problem.
Thank you in advance for any assistance you may be able to provide.

C.B.