Yes, Vista is old, yes, Windows 7 is much better, and yes, Windows 8 is already here. I’ve tried upgrade my Vista to Windows 8, and it was horrible for me.

First, when the system restarted and boot into Windows setup, it simply said unable to configure hardware, so it rebooted, and present me with Windows 8, Windows Setup and Windows Vista boot options, select Windows 8 will lead to another error and reboot, select Windows Setup and viola, corrupted the whole thing. So I decided to create an bootable USB and perform clean install, format my drive and then it shows could not install on selected drive error, after troubleshoot, use the command prompt in repair option to run some diskpart function, and it installed, and yes, the new UI have some inconsistent navigation flow (even for the very same button, it randomly navigate), very very confusing.

After installed and activated, try to run some update on the Windows 8 apps (the modern UI app thing), during update, it removed all the updating apps from my start menu, and the update keep on failing, I have no idea how to get them back. Then I try out the new split screen feature, and it keep crashing the Windows 8 apps, almost every time. Try to sync my iPhone through iTunes (the same installer I use on Vista and Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008), it just keep on disconnect my phone, too many trouble, so I decided to reinstall my Vista, this time, from USB. (Source)

To create a bootable USB from installer (I have ISO mounted), open command prompt with admin rights.

  1. Type diskpart and press Enter
  2. Type list disk and press Enter
  3. Verify the disk number for the USB drive
  4. Type select disk # and press Enter, e.g. select disk 1
  5. Type clean and press Enter.
  6. Type create primary partition and press Enter
  7. Type select partition 1 and press Enter
  8. Type active and press Enter
  9. Type format fs=ntfs quick and press Enter
  10. Type assign and press Enter.
  11. Type exit and press Enter to exit from diskpart, we still need command prompt here
  12. Use cd to navigate into the installer image drive, boot folder. e.g. F:\boot
  13. Type bootsect /nt60 H: and press Enter, where the H: is your USB drive
  14. After done, close command prompt, and copy every thing from the installer drive to the USB drive
  15. Reboot and select boot from USB

The problem I encountered is when selecting destination drive, it prompt “Windows is unable to find a system volume” message, most solution from the forum suggest remove all USB drive, which is not possible in this case. Since I have 2 hard drive for OS, the first boot drive is for my Hackintosh, with GPT format, the second drive is for my Windows, the solution is just changing the boot order of my hard drive, by making the Windows drive first boot, problem solved.