Vista strange problem when installing / slow / hung / cd driver

[acrobat]

I solved this already so I don't need any help here, but I am posting this just because I thought it was peculiar and interesting and it might serve as being useful or interesting for someone else in the future.

Are you sitting comfortably? Anyway, I installed Vista 32 Ultimate on my HTPC and it all installed in about 20 minutes or so, very quick and easy and no problems at all. That PC later had the motherboard die, which I got replaced with a different motherboard (because they had no more stock of the one that died). After fitting the new motherboard, I decided to format my hard disk and just install Vista again from scratch on to a nice formatted hard disk (because I didn't want traces of old failed driver installs and stuff..).

Anyway, so this second time I was installing on the *exact* same computer, from the exact same DVD disk, with the only difference being the motherboard. When it would boot on to the vista disk, I would get to a pretty green/blue coloured screen but with nothing on it but a mouse cursor. It would then stay stuck on that screen with nothing happening, for about 40 minutes! (Not an exaggeration). Then after about 40 minutes, it would ask me for my location info and stuff. So I do the UK, United Kingdom stuff, click next, and then another 40 minute pause! After that long pause, it would then come up with this strange message. This is the exact message by the way:

A required CD/DVD device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, DVD or USB flash drive, please insert it now.

Note: If the Windows installation media is in the CD/DVD drive, you can safely remove it for this step.

At that point, I was extra confused. I clicked to find a driver, and there was yet another enormous pause. This time it seemed much longer than 40 minutes (more like an hour and a half or even longer), and thanks to that weird message, I spent all that time googling for an explanation. It took a LOT of searching*, but I eventually found a message board thread on Microsoft's website with people talking about this. Crazily the thread dated back to 2006 and the replies kept coming in over the years until recently. Anyway, people would pop in and give various suggestions and solutions that worked for them. A common one being to set your DVD to master or slave using the jumper on the back, but modern drives don't seem to have that any more. Any way, there was one person out of about 100+ replies who mentioned the solution that worked for me. They said to try enabling AHCI in your BIOS.

The options in the BIOS for the drives, are SATA/RAID/AHCI. When I built my other PC a couple of years ago, AHCI was new and I had some problems with it, so for this PC I wasn't interested in AHCI or RAID, I just wanted to install all my drives as good ole easy SATA and that would be fine. And that worked fine the first time I installed it. But on this new motherboard, this was the crazy problem that arose. I was tempted to try using another DVD drive because that was a solution for a lot of people, but I didn't want to have to unplug the other DVD drive from my other PC, and I also heard that AHCI is well supported now and that all the drivers for it are included with Vista, so I thought I would be brave and just set it to use AHCI in the BIOS. And miraculously everything was perfect after that. The bios adds all new srubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishy messages when you boot up, and it does it's fancy AHCI business, and when I then booted off the Vista disk, the install then went through it's process nice and fast, just like it did the first time. I now have all my drives using AHCI too, which I suppose is a bonus because it forced me to use it, when I otherwise wouldn't have.



* = I actually spent probably 2 or 3 hours searching for answers to why this problem was happening and for a solution. And it just reminded me of how the internet can be very annoying some times! For example, I would see people posting the above message on a forum and asking for help, and there would be dozens of replies like, "Your DVD drive sounds broken, buy a better one". Or, "Your disk is scratched, get another one". Or, "Dude your computer is broken." Or, "You are so gay, you should go and have sex with a man, you big gay". And things like that. Helpful eh? It makes searching twice as long as it should be when you have to sift through all that kind of crap.

Anyway, that's my boring story. Hopefully this will be of value to someone somewhere sometime.