Did you check for bad RAM? The only time I've ever used Vista was when it was already installed on other people's computers, so I can't say that I have a lot of experience with it or with dual-booting Vista with Solaris or Linux. However, in my personal experience, usually when I'm doing a Red Hat or a Solaris installation and the computer crashes half way through the installation it's a sign that there's a bad spot in the computer's RAM that gets hit when the RAM starts to get filled up all the way. Examples of things that would fill up the RAM, hit the bad spot and cause your computer to crash or reboot might be: (a) running lots of virtual machines that eat up all the RAM or (b) burning DVD's with the Solaris cdrw -i command or (c) large file downloads / uploads / multiple bit-torrents etc. or (c) installing a big OS from a CD or DVD (like Red Hat Enterprise / CentOS) where large parts of the installation DVD get loaded into memory while the OS is being installed.
Remember: Bad RAM will give you bad CD / DVD reads. If you want to test your RAM, I think almost any Ubuntu installation CD or DVD comes with a memory tester built in (I usually use a Kubuntu / KDE Ubuntu 8.04 DVD to test RAM on my workstations). You can use it by shutting your computer down, take all of the sticks of RAM out except for one and then boot up off of the Ubuntu CD (instead of booting up from your hard disk drive) and when the Ubuntu menu loads, select the memory test option. After you're done testing that one stick of RAM, continue testing the other sticks of RAM one at a time. I have noticed that OpenSolaris 2008.05, although it runs like a true champion on old, dying hard drives in a mirrored ZFS Raid array, it does tend to be more sensitive to bad RAM than Windows or Linux because ZFS seems to make OpenSolaris use the leftover RAM that's not already being used by other processes more aggressively than what I've seen with other operating systems (i.e. ZFS will find new ways to use aggressively use neglected parts of RAM memory that other programs are not using). However, I actually think this is a good thing that OpenSolaris dies rather quickly when it stumbles upon bad RAM because I would rather find out that one of my servers had a bad stick of RAM in it when I was first setting the server up instead of the scenario that Windows Server 2003 gives you where everything seems to be running fine for months or years until your site suddenly becomes popular and the server gets a lot of hits and starts using a lot of RAM and all of a sudden the server is crashing and/or rebooting itself all the time when you need it the most. I have also heard stories of problems from other people where the file system and partitioning scheme that Vista uses is kind of screwy, so that if you try to have Vista and Linux or Vista and OpenSolaris on the same hard drive, either Vista gets screwed up or Linux / Unix gets screwed up, but I've never installed Vista or dual-booted it with another OS, so I wouldn't know for sure if this is true or not. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
