Topic: Did anybody else notice Sandra and I were

[Tony]

not posting for the same six hours ?

We......well to be honest, Sandra was at it for six hours non stop?

But the outcome was a beautiful baby .......





































































































Medion AKOYA P7300D, sporting an nice dual boot XP Pro 32 bit, and Vista Ultima 64 bit operating systems.

These Medion machines, are set up in such a way that they just reject any OS other than what Medion put on them. Medion give you two disks, one is Vista 32 bit or Vista 64 bit, but the PC will only accept either one of them, not both on the same machine. Nor will they let you install any other OS, if you don't like either of the flavours on offer.

But "Wonder Woman" did it again.........................I'll let the proud mother tell you the tale herself, for one thing she knows what she is talking about 

So tomorrow, I'll be installing my second graphics card [PCI] and seeing if the PC will support it alongside the PCI-Express graphics card in XP Pro. As you know it would not support it in Vista, so the answer to the question, is it a  "Hardware or OS conflict" will be answered tomorrow 

[Sandra]

Tony broke the golden rule and rang me at 10-30am 

He turned up around an hour later and dumped his brand new Medion on my desk.
Hed been trying to install a copy of XP Pro 32 bit and was expecting to be able to wipe the original OS off the drive and to be able to create 3 partitions on it , one for XP, another partition for Vista 64 and a third partition for storage.

As it booted from the XP CD it got to the copying files part and blue screened.
We both thought that it was something on the hard drive that Medion had put on to stop it taking another non medion supplied OS for some reason.

I tried a few things which all ended up with the blue screen before it would format the drive so I took the drive out and added it to one of my pcs, formatted it and created the 3 partitions in disk management.
We put it back in Tonys PC and booted from the XP CD. Same thing happened again at the same point.

I decided to look in the bios and eventually noticed that it wasnt detecting the SATA drive.
I dont know how it was managing to boot into its original Vista installation as it couldnt find the hard drive that the OS was on and I still dont know how it could do it 
Looking at the settings in the BIOS it didnt even list the SATA drive in the list of drives at first, then it appeared somehow after I clicked on something but cant remember what I clicked on, but it still wouldnt find it when installing an OS, until I altered it from being AHCI to IDE.

Once we had changed that setting in the BIOS it installed without any further problems, apart from getting the drivers to install.
Eventually we had it dual booted with XP pro 32 bit and Vista Ultimate 64 with everything working correctly and Tony drove off back over the border to the dark side (Yorkshire) around 6pm   

[Simon]

Well done you two!  A marriage made in heaven, it sounds! 

[Sandra]

Just found this that explains why Tony couldnt just install XP when he initially tried it :

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

From what I have read elsewhere the only real advantage in using the AHCI driver is to make your SATA drive hot swappable, not really advisable if your SATA drive is the boot drive, as in Tony's case 

Looks like you are never too old to learn 

[sam]

These Medion machines, are set up in such a way that they just reject any OS other than what Medion put on them. Medion give you two disks, one is Vista 32 bit or Vista 64 bit, but the PC will only accept either one of them, not both on the same machine. Nor will they let you install any other OS, if you don't like either of the flavours on offer.

That's really odd... I've installed Ubuntu onto a number of Medion machines, albeit not that type of machine... never had a problem (apart from a few odd drivers). Maybe it deals with the AHCI driver stuff... cause I've done it on machines where that was enabled (either that or I disabled it without thinking...). Either way though, great result!

[GillE]

I experienced similar issues with my Hewlett-Packard computer, so I doubt it's just a Medion problem.  In the end I gave up and resigned myself to using Vista.

[Sandra]

I think its because this new Medion is all SATA Sam. Previous ones were SATA plus a single IDE channel. So they would initially be set to run in IDE mode I assume.
I havent come across a fully SATA mobo before, only mixed SATA and IDE so I havent had that problem before.

[davy51]

I have had a couple of Gateways that did this

It is a big pain

[Tony]

Well if you all remember, the reason I wanted to install XP on the Medion, was because on my self build PC, I had dual booted W2K Pro 32 bit and XP Pro 64 bit. And the Matrox PCI lived alongside the Geforce AGP in complete harmony. Well we got  XP 32 bit dual booting with Vista, and where as Vista still only showed the Matrox as a disabled card error code 43. in Control > System> Hardware, and hence its total absence in Display Properties. Booted to XP, in Hardware it states the device is working correctly. And it shows up in Display Properties , as two yet to be enabled displays. But once you try and enable them, you get the message that the drivers are for an earlier version of windows and are not compatible. And all trace of it disappears in Display Properties.

Also when you boot too XP, I get an error message stating the the drivers for the PCI-E card are for an earlier version of windows, hence it has not been enabled, and is using the default VGA monitor. When in fact the card is displaying the Highest 32 bit colours, and can support maximum 1680x 1050 pixels.
It's as if I had booted into Vista, this to me confirmed my fears that there was indeed a OS conflict caused by Vista, and not a hardware issue. 

So I've decided to remove Vista altogether, and see if I can transfer my XP Pro 64 bit, onto the Medion, by speaking to a nice man/or not on the India Sub Continent. If not, I'll shift it via the Medion forum [there is a lot of sorry punters who missed getting one] or return it to Aldi under their 30 day returns policy. Don't get me wrong, I think the Medion P7300 D is a cracking machine, and will be vexed to see it go. I could not build it myself for that price, never mind the three year warranty. But I'm buggered if its going to sit there and have the odd game of Freecell played on it, between the odd visit to the M&S website.

I'll let you know how I go one 

[Simon]

What a let down.  Sorry to hear it's not working out as well as expected, Tony.

[Tony]

Have not gone to validation yet, but the PC is now at a state where there is no trace of Vista on it, only XP Pro 64 bit. And the graphics cards are working perfectly side by side with the ability to support four displays, no issues whatsoever.

So like I suspected in the beginning,it is a Vista issue not a hardware issue. And I'm not on my own, I read some where on the web that people where having this kind of issue with Vista, and Microsoft admited as much. I'll try and find the link if I can.

[Tony]

This looks like it is the cause of it,

Microsoft

Multimonitor Support in WDDM

On Windows Vista, older XPDM drivers still work and the multi-monitor behavior with XPDM drivers hasn't changed, because the operating system uses the legacy graphics stack.

However, the Windows Vista Display Driver Model (WDDM) brings fundamental changes to the management of multiple graphics adapters and external displays. This includes a new restriction, because WDDM drivers do not support "heterogeneous multi-adapter" multi-monitor implementations. Specifically:
•   

All graphics adapters in a system must use the same display driver model. That is, all of them should either be running XPDM or WDDM. The driver models are mutually exclusive, and Windows Vista does not allow the simultaneous loading of both an XPDM driver and a WDDM driver.

If a system has one graphics adapter with a XPDM driver and another with a WDDM driver, then Windows Vista will choose the POST device, which is the one with VGA resources. This is commonly referred to as the "VGA adapter."
•   

If multiple graphics adapters are present in a system, all of them must use the same WDDM driver. If there are two graphics adapters with WDDM drivers from two different manufacturers, then Windows will disable one of them. The VGA adapter will be enabled, and the second device will be disabled.

Notice that XPDM drivers still support heterogeneous multi-adapter as they did in Windows XP. A user who has such a configuration working fine in Windows XP will encounter a problem when upgrading to Windows Vista. An external monitor connected to one of the graphics adapters will have no video signal, because it is disabled. An error message will appear on system boot, as described later in this article.

[Tony]

Right, I explained to the nice India gentleman my predicement, about me wanting to transfer my recently purchased XP Pro 64 bit from my 2006 build PC.[I ommitted to say I had purchased a OEM copy] Because OEMversions are really ment to be for new build PC's, and not transferable to another PC. But surely Microsoft and he would beable to deduce that info from the XP installation. Anyway, he says you want to downgrade from Vista....I says yes due to the driver incompatability issue ..................So he did it for me, what a nice man.


Right I said I would take the XP Pro of my self build. And that is not a problem to me really because I have a "cough"  copy of XP Pro 32 bit [which runs the latest games, whereas W2K Pro does not] But the "what if question" for sake of discusion is.....would the original XP Pro 64 bit still run and access security updates............................not that I will risk it  .........anyway discuss 

[Simon]

Haven't a clue really, but one might assume that as long as the Windows installation is licenced, and activated, it should receive updates.  If one were to try to run two machines on the same licence, one would stop working.  But I know nothing... 

[Tony]

Haven't a clue really, but one might assume that as long as the Windows installation is licenced, and activated, it should receive updates.  If one were to try to run two machines on the same licence, one would stop working.  But I know nothing... 

Yes I see the logic in what your saying.

For those members like me who have not done a phone activation of Windows, here's how it pans out.


Obviously I did the phone up activation, so I could tell them the "tale" A rack of numbers come on screen [ 7 sets of 6 numbers]and you have to key them into the phone. Then of course, being an already activated copy, it failed validation, so put through to a guy who takes the first set of 6 numbers from you , and then if after hearing your story and accepts it as being a valid reason, you give him the last set of 6 numbers [missing out the middle 5 sets of 6 numbers that appeared on your desktop] And in return he gives you 7 sets of 6 different numbers to type into the boxes on the screen, your copy of windows is activated.

What made me think was, the guy never actually instructed me to remove the other installation........when I said I would, after he activated this installation.......he just said, yes you can do that.......not yes you must do that. Must admit it would save a lot of hassle not having to install an XP Pro 32 bit copy and re installing all the programs