After my hoopla with hard drive upgrades I twenty four hours later I couldn’t boot from either operating system and having had enough fun with that business I decided to reinstall Vista; I’d run Windows XP in a Virtual Box session.

Everything started fine but after the first reboot I would hit a Blue Screen Of Death that would reboot the machine: it flashed by so quickly I couldn’t read it.  Selecting Safe Mode showed the system loaded up to crcdisk.sys but then would reboot.

I tried different hard drives and removed half my 8 GB of RAM but to no avail.  Upgraded my BIOS to the latest version; didn’t know eVGA offered BIOS updates in ISO format.

Back to Google on my secondary PC and a search brought me to TechNet and Dziki Polak’s solution: have 2 GB or less of RAM for a Vista 64 bit install.  He was even using the same motherboard.  I left one 2 GB DIMM in the system and it completed the installation without a hitch.  Ran all the updates and added the full 8 GB of RAM back into the system: everything was running smooth.

Take away lessons here: after every service pack release for a Microsoft Operating System update your installation media.  I didn’t even have to go through the trouble of slipstreaming: I just downloaded Vista 64 bit with Service Pack 1 via my TechNet Plus Direct subscription.  And when in trouble don’t beat your head against the PC case: go to Google and track down a solution.