Thanks for the tip, Vista Installer

Recently my hard drive died, and while it's been in the RMA process I've been running Linux only off an old IDE drive of mine.

I've got my replacement now and started putting things back on to it last night. The first task was partitioning it (which I did using Linux tools so I could get everything just the way I wanted it). This includes a 250GB partition for Vista, which I use for games and games alone. Nothing but games...

So when it came to installing Vista it asked me to pick where I wanted to install it, to which I selected the aforementioned 250GB partition.

Upon clicking install, I got this error message:

Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation

Frikkin fantastic! Not only is the vista installer too brain dead to install to the partition I created for it (and explicitly pointed out to it), it won't tell me why. How's about telling me which criteria it's not meeting? That would be an excellent start.

In the end I did two things that fixed it (not sure if one or both was required, couldn't be bothered to do it scientifically).

The first thing was to delete the 100MB partition I'd created for the linux /boot mount. This was the only partition before the Vista one on the drive. If this was the problem I'd like to ram a rusty nail into the left eye of the developer that decided that was something that could prevent an installation. The partition is invisible to Windows anyway.

The second thing was to mark the Vista partition as 'bootable'. If this was the problem I'd like to ram a rusty nail into the right eye of the developer that decided that was something that could prevent an installation. The Vista installer can't mark a partition as bootable itself? Is it really that shit?

There is plenty on the net about other people having this same problem. More than one person had to unplug their card reader in order to get around this. Seriously, why the hell should the presence of a card reader prevent Vista from finding a partition to install on especially since the installer allows you to explicitly select the partition yourself.

The mind boggles.

Game developers: please get your finger out and start writing games that are cross-platform so I can finally wipe this chaff off my hard drive and out of my life for good...