Vista installation failure on X60s (17046DG)

[birchanger]

So, I upgraded the bios to 2.06, upgraded every piece of software I could, downloaded vista-capable drivers and printed out the upgrade instructions. Time to use my Vista Business upgrade disk.

The first couple of attempts failed with an incompatible driver. I think that was due to the Sierra Wireless card, which is known to cause problems. I HAD deinstalled it, but it got reinstalled after every boot. Still, at least Vista had rolled back any changes it had made.

Once I'd resolved that I got a little further. Now it failed with 'unable to load driver' - and it did NOT clean up after itself. The system now displays a boot menu, letting me choose the upgrade process (default) or my old XP Pro installation. Rather stupidly I decided to try to fix this minor inconvenience by rebuilding the MBR. Big mistake. I was stuck with a system that just booted to a black screen telling me that NTLDR is missing or corrupt.

In the end I decided that RnR was my only way out. This was not exactly painless. I'm sure some menus mentioned in the Help were missing, and I could see no way of, for instance, playing with the boot files. Also, for some reason, the recovery process could not see my backups on a network drive (even though the Rescue process could see them happily). In the end I needed to do a factory reinstall (luckily I had made product recovery disks) followed by a restore from my backup. This process was a bit heart-stopping at times, like when the system told me that there was a problem making it impossible to install RnR, but I got there eventually.

So, anyone else had similar problems with the vista upgrade? If so, did you manage to fix it?

Relevent configuration: X60s with CD/DVDRAM in Ultrabase, 1GB; upgrading from (fully updated) XP Pro SP2.