Hands on: Vista in the driving seat

Windows Vista finally resolves one of the most annoying catch-22s in PC installations: the need for a floppy drive for the latest disk controllers.

While Vista still offers the opportunity to install third-party disk controller drivers during its initial setup, and supports the use of a floppy drive to deliver them, it now adds CD, DVD and USB-connected media as alternative sources.

It’s been a long wait: having to dig out a dusty floppy drive and an ancient blank disk to install support for the latest hard disk controllers is one of the most infuriating aspects of building a modern system. After all, who fits a floppy when building a modern PC, and does the old drive lurking in the back of a cupboard even work?

Like many PC builders, I’ve often sacrificed the advanced features of a serial ATA (Sata) AHCI (advanced host controller interface) disk controller and switched it back to plain IDE emulation in the Bios for an easy Windows installation.

Now Vista finally lets us provide third-party disk controller drivers on far more convenient media, life is a lot better. If you’re really lucky, Vista might even recognise your AHCI or Raid disk controller during setup and install its own drivers.

The parallel problem
Unfortunately, my euphoria may be short-lived. Just as one problem has been solved, an equally infuriating one is puzzling Vista installers.

The long-standing snag that Vista solves concerns the fact that every Windows installation disc contains a certain number of standard device drivers. If your hard drive is connected to a controller for which Windows has a driver, the setup process can see the disk and install the operating system on it.

Problems occur when the hard disk is connected to a controller for which the Windows installer does not have a driver. Without an appropriate driver, Windows setup simply can’t see the hard disk and therefore cannot install on it.

The solution is to provide a driver for the controller during the initial installation, which for Windows XP and earlier versions involves pressing the F6 key after the setup process has begun. Windows setup would then request the driver, enabling it to see your hard disk and copy files to it. Annoyingly, though, Windows XP and earlier versions demanded that this driver be supplied on a floppy disk.

Vista eliminates this old-fashioned nonsense by accepting disk controller drivers on alternative, modern media, and even then may not need them all, thanks to a larger array of standard drivers on the installation DVD itself.